 Section 5 of History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, Volume 2, From the Deaths of Alexander I until the Deaths of Alexander III, 1825-1894, by Shimon Dubnov, translated by Israel Friedlander. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by SSKIM, Seoul, South Korea. Chapter 14, compulsory enlightenment and increased operation. Part 2. 3. The abolition of Jewish autonomy and renewed persecutions. No sooner had the school reform, which was tantamount to the obligation of Jewish school autonomy, been publicly announced than the government took steps to realize the second article with program, the annihilation of the remnants of Jewish communal autonomy. A new case published on December 19, 1844 ordered the placing of the Jews in the cities and countries under the jurisdiction of the general, i.e. Russian administration, with the abolition of the cars. By this new case, all the administrative functions of the cars were turned over to the police departments and those of an economic and fiscal character to the municipalities and town councils. The old elective car administration was to pass out of existence. Carried to its logical conclusions, this reform would necessarily have led, as it actually did lead in Western Europe to the abolition of the Jewish community outside the narrow limits of Senegal Paris. Had the Jews of Russia been placed at the same time on a footing of equality in regard to taxation. But such European consistency was beyond the mental range of Russian autocracy. It was neither willing to abandon the special and for the Jews doubly burdensome method of conscription, nor to forego the extra levies imposed upon the Jews over and above the general state taxes, for needs which, properly speaking, should have been met by the exchequer. Thus, it came about that for the sake of maintaining Jewish disabilities in the matter of conscription and taxation. The government itself was obliged to mitigate the blow at Jewish autonomy by allowing the institutions of Jewish conscription trustees and tax collectors elected by the Jewish communes from among the most dependable men to remain in force. The government, moreover, found it necessary to establish a special department for Jewish affairs at each municipality and town council. In this way, the law managed to destroy the self government of the car and yet preserve its rudimentary function as an autonomous fiscal agency, which was to be continued under the auspices of the municipality. In point of fact, the Ka'al, which through its trustees and captors had acted the part of a government tool in carrying out the dreadful military conscription, had long become thoroughly demoralized and had lost its former prestige as a great Jewish institution. Its transformation into a purely fiscal agency was merely the formal ratification of a sad fact. Having disposed of the cars as a vehicle of Jewish separatism, the government next attacked the special Jewish system of taxation, not to abolish it, of course, but rather to place it under a more rigorous control for the purpose of preventing it from serving in the hands of the Jews as an instrument for the attainment of specific Jewish ends. It is significant that on the same day on which the Ka'al U.K. was made public was also issued the new regulation concerning the basic tax. The revenue from this tax, which had for a long time been imposed upon kosher meat, was originally placed at the free disposal of the cars, though subject since 1839 to the combined control of the administration and municipality. According to the new enactment, the proceeds from the mid-tax, which was to be led to the highest bidder, were to be left entirely in the hands of the gubernatorial administration. The letter was instructed to see to it that the income from the tax should first be applied to cover the fiscal areas of the Jews, then to provide for the maintenance of the crown schools and the official promotion of agriculture among Jews, and only as a last item to be spent on the local charities. In addition to the general basic tax imposed upon all Jews who use kosher meat, an auxiliary basic tax was instituted to be levied on immovable property, as well as on business pursuits and bequests. Moreover, following the Austrian model, the government instituted or rather reinstituted the candle tax, a toll on Sabbath candles. The proceeds from this imposed on religious ceremony were to go specifically towards the organization of the Jewish crown schools and were placed entirely at the disposal of the Ministry of Public Instruction. Thus, in exact proportion to the curtailment of communal autonomy, voluntary self-taxation was gradually supplanted by compulsory government taxation, a circumstance which not only increased the financial burden of the Jewish message, but also tended to aggravate it from a moral point of view. The tax, as the meat tax was called for short, became in the course of time one of the scourges of Jewish communal life, that same life which the measures of the government had merely succeeded in disorganizing. Anxious as the government was to act diplomatically and for fear of intensifying the distrust of Russian Jewry towards the new scheme, to stem the flood of restriction during the execution of the school reform, it could not long restrain itself. The third plank in the platform of the Jewish committee, the increase of Jewish disabilities which had hitherto been kept in reserve, was now pressing forward and issued forth from the recesses of the chancellories somewhat earlier than tactical consideration might have dictated. On April 20, 1843, while the Enlightenment propaganda was in full swing, there suddenly appeared in the form of a resolution appended by the Tsar's own hand to the report of the council ministers the following court UKs. All Jews living within the 50 verse zone along the Prussian and Austrian frontier are to be transferred into the interior of the border governments. Those possessing their own houses are to be granted a term of two years within which to sell them, to be carried out without any excuses. On the receipt of this green command, the senate was at first puzzled as to whether the imperial order was mere repetition of the former law concerning the expulsion of the Jews from the villages and hamlets on the frontier. Or whether it was a new law involving the expulsion of all Jews on the border without discrimination, including those in the cities and towns. Suede by the harsh and emphatic tone of the imperial resolution, the senate decided to interpret the new order in the sense of complete and absolute expulsion. This interpretation received the Tsar's approbation, except that the time limit for the expulsion of real estate owners was extended for two years more, and the ruined exiles were promised temporary relief from taxation. The new catastrophe which descended upon tens of thousands of families, particularly in the government of Kovner, caused the cry of horror not only throughout the border zone but also abroad. When the Jews doomed to expulsion were ordered by the police to state places with their intent to emigrate, 19 communities refused to comply with this demand and declared that they would not abandon their herds and the graves of their forefathers and would only yield to force. Public opinion in Western Europe was running high with indignation. The French, German and English papers condemned in no uncertain terms the Polish of New Spain. Many Jewish communities in Germany petitioned the Russian government to revoke the terrible expulsion decree. There was even an attempt at diplomatic intervention. During this day in England, Nicolas I was approached on behalf of the Jews by personnel of high rank. Yet the government would scarcely have yielded to public protest had it not become patterned that it was impossible to carry out the decree without laying waste entire cities and thereby affecting injuriously the interests of the exchequer. The fatal U.K.s was not officially repealed but government did not insist on its execution. In the meantime, the Jewish committee kept up correspondence with the governor's general in regard to the ways and means of carrying into effect the third article of his program, the assortment or classification of the Jews. The plan called for the division of all Russian Jews into two categories, into useful and useless ones. The former category was to consist of merchants affiliated with guilds, artisans belonging to trading unions, agriculturalists and those of the burger class who owned immovable property with definite income. All other burgers who could not claim such a financial status and had no definite income. In other words, the large mess of petty tradesmen and popes were to be labeled as useless or detrimental and subjected to increased disabilities. The inquiry of the Ministry of the Interior regarding the feasibility of such an assortment met with a strongly-worded rebuttal from the Governor-General of New Russia, Vorontsov. While on a leave of absence in London, this Russian dignitary, who had evidently been affected by English ideas, prepared a memorandum and sent it in October 1843 to St. Petersburg with the request to have it submitted to the Tsar. I venture to think, quote Vorontsov with reference to the project in the segregation of the useless Jews, that the application of the term useless to several hundred thousand people who by the will of the Almighty have lived in this empire from ancient times is in itself both cruel and unjust. The project labors as useless all those numerous Jews who are engaged either in the retail purchase of goods from their original manufacturers for delivery to wholesale merchants were in the useful distribution among the consumers of the merchandise obtained from the wholesalers. Judging impartially, one cannot help wondering how these numerous tradesmen can be regarded as useless and consequently as detrimental if one bears in mind that by the petty and frequently maligned pursuits they promote not only rural but also commercial life. The atrocious scheme of asserting the Jews is nailed down by Vorontsov as a bloody operation over a whole class of people which is threatened not only with hardship but also with annihilation through poverty. I venture to think with these words Vorontsov concludes his memorandum that this measure is both harmful and cruel. On the one side, hundreds of thousands of hands which assist petty industry in the provinces will be turned aside when there is no possibility and for a long time they will be known of replacing them. On the other side, the cries and moans of such an enormous number of unfortunate will serve as a reproach to our government not only in our own country but also beyond the confines of Russia. Since the time of Sparansky and the like-minded members of the Jewish Committee of 1803 and 1812, the leading spheres of St. Petersburg had had no chance to hear such courageous and truthful words. Vorontsov's objection implied a crushing criticism of the whole fallacious economic policy of the government in branding the petty tradesmen and middlemen as an injurious element and building their own, a whole system of anti-Jewish persecution and cruelties. But St. Petersburg was not amenable to reason. The early concession rested from the Jewish Committee consisted in replacing the term useless as applied to small tradesmen by the designation not engaged in productive labor. The cruel project continued to engage the attention of the Jewish Committee for a long time. In April 1815, the chairman of the Committee, Kizlev, addressed the circular to the governor's general in each. He pointed out that after the promulgation of the laws concerning the establishment of crown schools and the abolition of the cars, laws which were aimed at the weakening of the influence of the Talmud and the destruction of all institutions fostering the separate individuality of the Jews. The term had come for carrying the effect by means of the proposed classification, the measures directed towards the transfer of the Jews to useful labor. Of the regulations tending to affect the Jews culturally, the circular emphasizes the prohibition of Jewish stress to take effect after the lapse of five years. All the regulations alluded to, Kizlev writes, have been issued and will be issued separately in order to conceal their interrelations and common aim from the fanaticism of the Jews. For this reason, his imperial majesty has been graciously pleased to command me to communicate all that said plans to the governor's general confidentially. It would seem, however, that the Russian authorities had grossly underestimated the political sense of the Jews. They were not aware of the fact that St. Petersburg's conspiracy against Judaism had long been exposed in the pale of settlement, if only for the reason that the conspirators were not clever enough to hide even for a time the chastising note beneath the clock of the cultural reforms. 4. Intercession of Western European Jewelry The mask of the Russian government was soon torn down, also before the eyes of Western Europe. In the initial stage of Lelyanta's campaign, public-minded Jews of Western Europe were inclined to believe that a happy era was drawing upon their co-religionists in Russia. At the instance of Ubarov, Lelyanta had entered into correspondence with Philipson, Geiger, Cremio, Montefiore and other leaders of Western European Jewelry, speaking their moral support on behalf of the school reform and going so far as to invite them to participate in the proceedings of the rabbinical commission convened at St. Petersburg. The replies from these prominent Jews were full of complementary references to Ubarov's endeavors. The Argymian excitement there's eudentums, in the beginning of the 40s, voiced the general belief that the era of persecution in Russia had come to an end. The frontier explosions of 1843 acted like a cold douche on these enthusiasts. They realized that the pitiless punishment of thousands of families from home and herds was not altogether compatible with benevolent intentions. A sensational piece of news made its rounds through Germany. The well-known painter Oppenheim of the Frankfurt Undermine had given up working at the large picture ordered by the leaders of several Jewish communities for the presentation to the Tsar. The painting had been intended as an allegory, picturing a sunrise in a dark realm, but the happy anticipations proved will or the wisp and the plan had to be given up. Instead, Western Europe was resounding with moans from Russia, betalking new persecutions and even more atrocious schemes of restrictions. The sufferings of the Russian Jews suggested the thought that it was the duty of the influential Jews of the West to intercede on behalf of their persecuted brethren before the Emperor of Russia. The choice fell on the famous Jewish philanthropist in London, so Moses Montefiore, who stood in close relations to the court of King Victoria. Having established his fame by championing the Jewish cause in Turkey during the ritual Mother Trial of Damascus in 1840, Montefiore resolved to make a similar attempt in the land of the Tsar. In the beginning of 1846, he set out for Russia ostensibly in the capacity of a traveler, desirous of familiarizing himself with the conditions of his co-legionists. Montefiore, who was the builder of a personal recommendation from King Victoria to the Russian Emperor, was received in St. Petersburg with great honors. During an audience granted to Montefiore in March 1846, the Tsar expressed his willingness to receive from him through the medium of the Jewish Committee, suggestions bearing on the condition of the Russian Jews based on the information to be gathered by him on his travels. Montefiore's journey through the Pale of Settlement, including a visit to Vilna Warsaw and other cities, was marked by great solemnity. He was cautiously received by the highest local officials who acted according to instructions from St. Petersburg, and he met everywhere with an enthusiastic welcome from the Jewish masses who expected great results from his intercession before the Tsar. Needless to say, these expectations were not realized. On his return to London, Montefiore addressed various petitions to Kizilip, the Chairman of the Jewish Committee, to Minister Uvarov and to Paskewicz, the then Visoroi of Poland. Everywhere he pleaded for a mitigation of the harsh laws which were pressing upon his unfortunate patron, for the restoration of the recently abolished communal autonomy, for the harmonization of the school reform with the religious traditions of the Jewish masses. The Tsar was informed of the contents of these petitions, but it was all of no avail. In the same year, another influential foreigner made an unsuccessful attempt to improve the condition of the Russian Jews by emigration. A rich Jewish merchant of Marseilles, named Isaac Altaraz, came to Russia with a proposal to transplant a certain number of Jews to Algiers, which had recently passed on the French rule. Fortified by letters of recommendation from Premier Kizil and other high officials in France, Altaraz entered into negotiations with ministers Nessa Rode and Perovsky in St. Petersburg and with Visoroi Paskewicz in Warsaw for the purpose of obtaining permission for a certain number of Jews to emigrate from Russia. He gave the assurance that the French government was ready to admit into Algiers full-fledged citizens, thousands of destitute Russian Jews, and that the means for transferring them would be provided by lost-child banking house in Paris. At first, while in St. Petersburg, Altaraz was informed that permission to leave Russia would be granted only on the condition that a fixed ransom be paid for every immigrant. In Warsaw, however, which city he visited later, in October 1846, he was notified that the Tsar had decided to waive the ransom. For some unexplained reason, Altaraz left Russia suddenly and the scheme of a Jewish mass emigration failed through. 5. The Economic Plight of Russian Jewry and Agricultural Experiments The attempt at thinning the Jewish population by emigration having failed. The congested Jewish masses continued to gasp for air in their pale of settlement. The slightest effort to penetrate beyond the pale into the interior was treated as a criminal offense. In December 1847, the Council of State engaged in a protracted and honest discussion about the geographical point up to which the Jewish coachman of Polotsk should be allowed to drive the inmates of the local school of cadets on their annual trip to the Russian capital. The discussion arose out of the fact that the road leading from Polotsk to St. Petersburg is crossed by lines separating the pale from the prohibited interior. The proposal had been made to permit the coachman to drive their passengers as far as Pushkop, but when the report was submitted to the Tsar, he offended the following resolution. Agreeable, though not to Pushkop, but Ostrov, the town nearest to the pale. On this trivial kind were Russia's method in curtailing Jewish rights three months before the great upheaval, which in adjoining Germany and Austria dealt the death blow to absolutism and inaugurated the era of the Second Emancipation. As for the economic life of the Jews, it had been completely undermined by the system of ruthless tutelage which the government had employed for a quarter of a century in the hope of reconstructing it. All these drumhead methods, such as the hurling of masses of living beings from villages into towns and from the border zones into the interior, the prohibition of certain occupations and the artificial promotions of others could not but result in economic ruin instead of leading to economic reform. Nor was the government system of encouraging agriculture among Jews attended by greater success. In consequence of the explosion of tens of thousands of Jews from the villages of white Russia in 1823, some 2,000 refugees had drifted into the agricultural colonies of new Russia, but all they did was to replace the human wastage from increased mortality, which owing to the change of climate and the unaccustomed condition of rural life had decimated the original settlers. During the reign of Nicholas, efforts were again made to promote agricultural colonization by offering the prospective immigrants subsides and elevations in taxation. Even more valuable was the privilege of relieving the colonists from military service for a term of 25 to 50 years from the time of settlement. Yet, only a few tried to escape conscription by taking refuge in their colonies, for the military regime gradually penetrated into these colonies as well. The Jewish colonists was subject to the grim tutelage of Russian curators and superintendents, retired army men who watched his every step and punished the slightest carelessness by conscription or expulsion. In 1836, the government conceived the idea of enlarging the area of Jewish agricultural colonization. By an imperial re-script, certain lands in Siberia, situated in the government of Toborsk and in the territory of Omsk, were set aside for this purpose. Within a short time, 1317 Jews declared their readiness to settle on the new lands, many had actually started on their way in batches. But in January 1837, the Tsar quite unexpectedly changed his mind. After reading the reports of the council of ministers on the first results of the immigration, he put down the resolution. The transplantation of Jews to Siberia is to be stopped. A few months later, orders were issued to intercept those Jews who were on their way to Siberia and transfer them to the Jewish colonies in the government of Kersun. The unfortunate immigrants were seized on the way and conveyed, like criminals under a military escort, into places in which they were not in the least interested. Legislative wins of this kind, coupled with uncouth system of tutelage, were quite sufficient to crush in many Jews the desire of turning to the soil. Nevertheless, the colonization made slow progress, gradually spreading from the government of Kersun to the neighboring governments of Yekaterino Slav and Veselavia. Strait Jewish agricultural settlements also appeared in Lithuania and White Russia, but a comparative handful of some 10,000 Jewish peasants could not affect the general economic makeup of millions of Jews. In spite of all shocks, the economic structure of Russian Jewry remained essentially the same. As before, the central place in this structure was occupied by the liquor traffic, though modified in a certain measure by the introduction of more extensive system of public leases. Above the rank and file of Tavern keepers, both rural and urban, there had arisen a class of wealthy tax farmers who kept the monopoly on the sale of liquor or the collection of excise in various governments of the pale. They functioned as the financial agents of the Exchequer, while the Jewish employees in their meals, storehouses and offices acted as their sub-agents, forming a class of officials of their own. The place next in importance to the liquor traffic was occupied by retail and wholesale commerce. The crafts and their spiritual professions came last. Populism was the inevitable companion of this economic organization, and people without definite occupations were counted by the hundreds of thousands. End of section 5. Section 6 of History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume 2. From the death of Alexander I until the death of Alexander III. 1825 to 1894 by Szymon Dubnop. Translated by Israel Friedlander. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by SS Kim. Seoul. South Korea. Chapter 14. Compulsory Enlightenment and increased oppression. Part 3. 6. The Ritual Mother Trial of Belize. The ordinary persecutions under which the Jews in Russia were groaning were accompanied by afflictions of an extraordinary kind. The severest among these were the Ritual Mother Trials, which became of frequent occurrence, tending to deepen the medieval gloom of that period. True, Ritual Mother Cases had occurred during the reign of Alexander I, but it was only on the Nicholas that they assumed the malign and dangerous form. In the year 1816, shortly before Passover, a dead body was found in the vicinity of Grotno, and identified as that of the four-year-old daughter of Grotno resident, Mary Adamovich. Rumors were spread among the superstitious Christian populace to the effect that the girl had been killed for ritual purposes, and the police swayed by these rumors set about to find the culprits among the Jews. Suspicion fell on a member of Grotno Kahal, Shalom Lapin, whose house was joined by the Adamovich family. The only evidence against him was a hammer and pike found in his house. A resident named Savitsky, a converted Jew, appeared as a material witness before the commission of inquiry and delivered himself of a statement full of ignorant trash, which was intended to show that Christian blood is exactly what is needed according to the Jewish religion. Here, the witness referred to the Bible story of the Exodus and to two mythical authorities, the philosopher Rosier and the prophet Azaria. He further disposed that every rabbi is obliged to satisfy the whole Kahal under his restriction by smearing with same, with Christian blood, the lintels of every house on the first day of the feast of Passover. Prompted by greed and by the desire to distinguish himself, the surgeon declared himself ready to substantiate his testimony from Jewish literature if the chief government will grant him the necessary assistance. The results of this secret investigation were laid before the governor of Grotno and reported by him to St. Petersburg. In reply, Alexander I issued a manuscript in February 1817 ordering that the secret investigation be cut short and the murderer be found out, intimating thereby that such be made for the criminal and not for the tenants of the Jewish religion. However, all efforts to discover the culprit failed and the case was dismissed. This favorable issue was in no small measure due to the endeavors of the deputies of the Jewish people, in particular to Zonenburg, the deputy from Grotno. These deputies, who were present in St. Petersburg at the time, addressed themselves to Kolitsyn, the minister of ecclesiastic affairs, protesting against the ritual model libel. The trial at Grotno and the ritual model accusations, which simultaneously cropped up in the Kingdom of Poland, made the minister of ecclesiastic affairs realize that there is in the western region a dangerous tendency of making the Jews. The scapegoats for every mysterious murder case and of fabricating lawsuits of the medieval variety by bringing popular superstition into play. Kolitsyn, a Christian pietist, who was nevertheless profoundly averse to narrow ecclesiastic monotheism, decided to strike at the root of this superstitious legend, which was disgracing Poland in a period of decay and was about to fall as a dark stain upon Russia. He succeeded in impressing this conviction upon his like-minded sovereign Alexander I. In the same month in which the UK's concerning the Society of Israelite Christians was published, Kolitsyn sent out the following circular to the governors, dated March 6, 1817. In view of the fact that in several of the provinces acquired from Poland, cases still occur in each, the Jews are falsely accused of murdering Christian children for the alleged purpose of obtaining blood. His Imperial Majesty, taking into consideration that similar accusations have on previously numerous occasions been refuted by impartial investigations and royal charters, has been graciously pleased to convey to those at the head of the governments in his sovereign will that henceforward the Jews shall not be charged with murdering Christian children without any evidence and purely as a result of the superstitious belief that they are in need of Christian blood. One might have thought that this emphatic script would suffice to put a stop to the efforts of ignorant adventurers to resuscitate the bloody myth. And for several years indeed, the sinister agitation kept quiet, but towards the end of Alexander's reign, it came to life again and gave rise to the monstrous Veliz case. In the year 1823, on the first day of the Christian Passover, a boy of three years, Theodor Emelyanov, the son of Russian soldier, disappeared in the city of Veliz in the government of Vitebsk. Ten days later, the child's body was found in a swamp beyond the town, stepped all over and covered with wounds. The medical examination and preliminary investigation were influenced by the popular belief that the child had been tortured to death by the Jews. This belief was fostered by two Christian fortune tellers, a prostitute beggar woman called Mary Terentieva and a half-mitted old maid by the name of Yeremia Yeva, who by way of divination made the parents of the child believe that its death was due to the Jews. At the judicial inquiry, Terentieva implicated two of the most prominent Jews of Veliz, the merchant Schumerica Berlin and Yevtsik Zitlin, a member of the local town council. Protracted investigation failed to substantiate the fabrications of Terentieva, and in the autumn of 1884, the Supreme Court of the government of Vitebsk rendered the following verdict. To leave the accidental death of the soldier boy to the will of God, to declare all the Jews against whom the charge of murder has been brought on mere surmises free from all suspicion, to turn over the soldier woman Terentieva for her propeligate conduct to a priest for repentance. However, in view of the exceptional gravity of the crime, the court recommended to the gubernatorial administration to continue its investigation. Despite the verdict of the court, the dark forces among the local population, prompted by hatred of the Jews, bent all their efforts on putting the investigation on the wrong track. The law mercenary Terentieva became the ready tool. When in September 1825, Alessandro I was passing through Veliz, she submitted a petition to him, complaining about the failure of the authorities to discover the mother of the little Theodor, whom she unblushingly designated as her own child, and declared to have been tortured to death by the Jews. But Tsar, entirely oblivious of his UK's of 1817, instructed the white Russian governor general Kovansky to start the new rigorous inquiry. The imperial order gave the governor general, who was a Jew hater and a believer in the hideous rival, unrestricted scope for his anti-Semitic instincts. He entrusted the conduct of the new investigation to Subelton by the name of Strakov, a man of the same ilk, conferring upon him the widest possible powers. On his arrival in Veliz, Strakov first of all arrested Terentieva and subjected her to a series of cross examinations, during which he endeavored to put her on what he considered the desirable track. Stimulated by the prosecutor, the prostitute managed to concoct a regular crime romance. She deposed that she herself had participated in the crime, having leered little Theodor into the homes of Zetlin and Berlin. In Berlin's house and later on in the synagogue, a crowd of Jews of both sexes had subjected the child to the most horrible tortures. The boy had been stabbed and butchered and rolled about in a barrel. The blood squeezed out of him had been distributed on the spot among those present, who therefore proceeded to soak pieces of linen in it and to pour it out in bottles. All these tortures had been perpetuated in her own presence and with the active participation both of herself and the Christian servant girls of the two families. It may be added that Terentieva did not make this statement at one time but at different intervals, inventing fresh details at each new examination and often getting muddled in a story. The implicated servant girls at first denied their share in the crime but yielding to external pressure like Terentieva, they too were sent for frequent admonition to a local priest called Taraskevic, a ferocious antisemite. They were gradually led to indoors, the depositions of the principal material witness. On the strength of these indictments, Strakhov placed the implicated Jews on the rest at first two highly esteemed ladies, Slava Berlin and Hannah Zetlin, later on their husbands and relatives and finally a number of other Jewish residents of Belize. In all, 42 people were seized, put in chains and thrown into jail. The prisoners were examined with vengeance, they were subjected to the old fashioned judicial procedure which approached closely the method of medieval torture. The prisoners denied their guilt with indignation and when confronted with Terentieva, denounced her vehemently as a liar. The excruciating close examination brought some of the prisoners to the verge of madness. But as far as Strakhov was concerned, the historical fits of the women, the angry speeches of the men, the remarks of some of the accused such as, I shall tell everything but only to the Tsar, served in his eyes as evidence of the Jews' guilt. In his reports, he assured his superior Kovansky that he had gotten the track of a monstrous crime perpetrated by a whole kahl with the assistance of several Christian women who had been led astray by the Jews. In communicating his findings to St. Petersburg, the White Russian Governor General presented the case as a crime committed on religious grounds. In reply, he received the fatal resolution of Emperor Nicholas, dated August 16, 1828 to the following effect. Whereas the above occurrence demonstrates that the Zid make wicked use of the religious tolerance according to them. Therefore, as a warning and as an example to others, let the Jewish schools, the synagogues of the valleys, be sealed up until further orders and let services be forbidden whether in them or near them. The imperial resolution was couched in the fierce language of the new reign, which had begun in the meantime. It rose in the bloody midst of the valleys of fear. The fatal consequences of this synchronism were not limited to the Jews of valleys. Judging by the contents and harsh wording of the resolution, Nicholas I was convinced at the time of the truth of the ritual model library. The mysterious and unloved tribe rose before the vision of the new Tsar as a band of cannibals and evil doers. This sinister notion can be traced in the conscription statute, which was then in the course of preparation in St. Petersburg and was soon afterwards to stir Russian jewelry to its depths, dooming their little ones to martyr them. While punishment was to be meted out to the entire Jewish population of Russia, the fate of the valleys community was particularly tragic. It was subjected to the terrors of a unique state of siege. The whole community was placed under suspicion. All the synagogues were shut up as if they were dens of divs, and the helpless Jews could not even assemble in prayer to pour out their hearts before God. All business was at a standstill. The shops were closed, and gloomy faces flitted shyly across the streets of the doomed city. The stern command from St. Petersburg ordering that the case be positively probed to the bottom, and that the culprits be apprehended, led only the hearts of Strakov, the chairman of the commission of inquiry, who was now free to do as he pleased. He spread out the net of inquiry in ever-wider circles. Terentieva and the other female witnesses, who were fed well while in prison and expected not only amnesty, but also renumeration for their services, gave more and more vent to their imagination. They recollected and revealed before the commission of inquiry a score of religious crimes which they alleged had been perpetrated by the Jews prior to the Valley's affair, such as the murder of children in suburban Inns, the desecration of church utensils and similar misdeeds. The commission was not slow in communicating the new revelation to the Tsar, who followed vigilantly the development in the case. But the commission had evidently overriched itself. The Tsar began to suspect that there was something wrong in these endlessly growing tango crimes. In October 1827, he attached to the reports of the commission the following resolution. It is absolutely necessary to find out who those unfortunate children were. This ought to be easy if the whole thing is not a miserable lie. His belief in the guilt of the Jews had evidently been shaken. In its endeavours to make up for the lack of substantial evidence, the commission, personified by Kovansky, put itself in communication with the governors of the Pale, dragging them to obtain information concerning all local ritual murder cases in past years. The effect of these inquiries was to revive the Grudner affair of 1818, which had been left to oblivion. A certain converts, by the name of Gudalinsky from the townlet of Bobovnia in the government of Minsk, declared before the commission of inquiry that he was ready to point out the description of the ritual murder ceremony in a secret Hebrew work. When the book was produced and the incriminated passage translated, it was found that it referred to the Jewish rites of slaughtering animals. The apostate, those called red-handed, confessed that he had turned informer in the hope of making money and was by imperial command sent into the army. The confidence of St. Petersburg in the activity of the release commission of inquiry vanished more and more. Kovansky was notified that his majesty the emperor, having observed that the commission basis is deductions mostly on surmises by attaching significance to the fits and gestures of the incriminated during the examinations. These full of apprehension, lest the commission carried away by zeal and anti-Jewish prejudice, act with a certain amount of bias and protract the case to no purpose. Soon afterwards, in 1830, the case was taken out of the hands of the commission, which had become entangled in a mesh of lies. Strakhov had died in the meantime and was turned over to the Senate. Weighed down by the nightmare proportions of the material which the release commission had managed to pile up, the members of the fifth department of the Senate which was charged with the case were inclined to announce the verdict of guilty and to sentence the convicted Jews to deportation to Siberia with the application of the mouth and whip. 1831. In the higher court, the plenary sessions of the Senate, there was a disagreement. The majority voting guilty, while three senators, referring to the UK's of 1817, were in favor of setting the prisoners at liberty, but keeping them at the same time under police surveillance. In 1834, the case reached the highest court of the Empire, the Council of State, and here, for the first time, the real effects came to light. Trus found his champion in the person of the eight statesmen, Mordivinov, who owned some estates near the valleys and being well acquainted with the Jews of the town, was roused to indignation by the forced charges concocted against them. In his capacity as president of the department of civil and ecclesiastical affairs of the Council of State, Mordivinov, after sifting the evidence carefully, succeeded in a number of sessions to demolish completely the Babel Tower of Lies, directed by Strakov and Kovansky, and to adduce proofs that the governor general, blinded by anti-Jewish prejudice, had misled the government by his communications. The department of civil and ecclesiastical affairs was convinced by the arguments of Mordivinov and other champions of the truth, and handed down a decision that the accused Jews be set at liberty and reordered for their innocent sufferings and that the Christian women informers be deported to Siberia. The plenary meetings of the Council of State concurred in the decision of the department, rejecting only the clothes providing for the reward of the sufferers. The verdict of the Council of State was submitted to the Tsar and received his endorsement on January 18, 1835. It read as follows. The Council of State, having carefully considered all the circumstances of this complex and involved case, finds that the depositions of the material female witnesses, Terentieva, Maksimova, and Kozlovska, containing as they do numerous contradictions and absurdities, and lacking all positive evidence and indivisible conclusions, cannot be admitted as legal proof to convict the Jews of the grave crimes imputed to them, and therefore renders the following decision. One, the Jews accused of having killed the soldier boy Emilianov and of other similarities which are implied in the various trial, no indictment whatsoever having been found against them shall be freed from further judgment and inquiry. Two, the material witnesses, the peasant woman Terentieva, the soldier woman Maksimova, and the shakta woman Kozlovska, having been convicted of uttering livers which they have not in the least been able to corroborate, shall be exiled to Siberia for permanent residence. Three, the peasant maid Yeremiyereva, having posed among the common people as a suit seyer, shall be turned over to a priest for admonition. After attaching his signature to this verdict, Nikolas I added in his own handwriting the following characteristic resolution, which was not to be made public. While sharing the view of the council of state that in this case, owing to the vagueness of the legal deductions, no other decision than the one embodied in the opinion confirmed by me could have been reached. I deem it however necessary to add that I do not have and indeed cannot have the inner conviction that the murder has not been committed by the Jews. Numerous examples of similar murders go to show that among the Jews there probably exist fanatics or sectarians who consider Christian blood necessary for their rights. This appears no more possible since unfortunately, even among us Christians, there sometimes exist such sects which are no less horrible and incomprehensible. In a word, I do not for a moment think that this custom is common to all Jews, but I do not deny the possibility that there may be among them fanatics just as horrible as among us Christians. Having taken this idea into his head, Nikolas I refused to sign the second decision of the council of state, which was closely allied with the verdict that all governors be instructed to be guided in the future by the UK's of 1817, forbidding to stir up ritual murder cases from prejudice only. While rejecting this prejudice in its full-fledged shape, the Tsar acknowledged it in part in somewhat attenuated form. Towards the end of January 1835, an imperial UK's which the city of Belize, ordering the liberation of the exculpated Jews, reopening of the synagogues which had been sealed since 1826 and handing back to the Jews of the Holy Scrolls, which had been confiscated by the police. The dungeon was now ready to give up its inmates whose strength had been sapped by the long confinement, while several of them had died during the imprisonment. The synagogues, which had not been allowed to resound its mourns of the martyrs, were now opened for the prayers of the liberated. The state of siege, which for nine long years had been throttling the city was at last taken off. The terror which had haunted the ostracized community came to an end. A new leaf was added to the annals of Jewish martyrdom, one of the gloomiest in spite of its happy finale. The ritual mother trials did not exhaust the extraordinary afflictions of Nicolaus's reign. There were cases of wholesale chastisement inflicted on more tangible grounds when misdeeds over a few individuals were puffed up into criminal crimes and visited cruelly upon entire communities. The conscription horrors of that period, when the Kahals were degraded to police agencies for capturing recruits, had bred the informing disease among the Jewish communities. They produced the type of professional informer or Mosul, who blackmailed the Kahal authorities of its town by threatening to disclose their abuses, the absconding of candidates for the army and various irregularities in carrying out the conscription, and in this way extorted silence money from them. These scoundrels made life intolerable, and there were occasions when the people took the law into their own hands and secretly dispatched the most objectionable among them. A case of this kind came to light in the government of Podolia in 1836. In the town Novaya Ushitsa, two Mosuls, named Oksman and Svaz, who had terrorized the Jews of the whole province, were found dead. Rumors had it that the one was killed in the synagogue and the other on the road to the town. The Russian authorities regarded the crime as the collective work of the local Jewish community, or rather of several neighboring Jewish communities, which had perpetuated this wicked deed by the verdict of their own tribunal. About 80 Kahal elders and other prominent Jews of Ushitsa and adjacent towns, including two rabbis were put on trial. The case was submitted to a court martial which resolved to subject the guilty to an exemplary punishment. Twenty Jews were sentenced to hard labor and to penal military service, with the preliminary punishment by spies written through 500 men. A like number was sentenced to be deported to Siberia. The rest were either acquitted or had fled from justice. Many of those who ran the gauntlet died on the strokes and are remembered by the Jewish people in Russia as martyrs. The scourge of informers was also responsible for the Mr. Slavel affair. In 1844, a Jewish crowd in the marketplace of Mr. Slavel, a town in the government of Mogilev, came into conflict with the detachment of soldiers who were searching for contraband goods in a Jewish warehouse. The results of the fray were a few bruised Jews and several broken rifles. The local police and military authorities seized this opportunity to ingratiate themselves with their superiors and reported to the governor of Mogilev and the commander of the garrison that the Jews had organized a mutiny. The local informer, Alie Briskine, a converted Jew found this incident on equally convenient occasion to wreck vengeance on his former coalitionist for the contempt in which he was held by them and allowed himself to be taken into tow by the official Jew-baters. In January 1844, alarming communications concerning a Jewish mutiny reached St. Petersburg. The matter was reported to Tsar and a shift and court resolution followed. To court martial the principal culprits implicated in this incident and in the meantime as a punishment for the turbulent demeanors of the Jews of that city to take from them one recruits for every ten men. Once more, the principles of that period were applied, one for all, first punishment then trial. The U.K.s arrived in Mrs. Laval on the eve of Purim and threw the Jews into consternation. During the Fest of Esther, the synagogues resounded with wailing. The city was in a state of terror. The most prominent leaders of the community were drawn into jail and had to submit to disfigurement by having half of their heads and beards shaved off. The penal recruits were hunted down without any regard to age since according to the Tsar's resolution, a tenth of the population had to be impressed into military service. Pending the termination of the trial, no Jew was allowed to leave the city while natives from Mrs. Laval in other places were captured and conveyed to their native town. A large Jewish community was threatened with complete annihilation. The Jews of Mrs. Laval threw their spokesman Petition St. Petersburg to wait with the penal conscription until the conclusion of the trial and endeavored to convince the central government that the local administration had misrepresented the character of the instant. To save his brethren, the popular champion of the interests of his people, the merchant Isaac Zelikin of Monastokina, called affectionately Rabbi Itzele, joined to the capital. He managed to get the ear of the chief of the Third Section and to acquaint him with the horrors which were being perpetrated by the authorities in Mrs. Laval. As a result, two commissioners were dispatched from St. Petersburg in quick succession. On investigating the matter on the spot, they discovered the machinations of the overzealous officials and apostatized informers who had represented a street quarrel as an organized uprising. The new commission of inquiry of which one of the St. Petersburg commissioners, Count Trubetskoi, was member disclosed the fact that the Jewish community as such had had nothing whatsoever to do with what had occurred. The findings of the commission resulted in an imperial act of grace. The imprisoned Jews were set at liberty. The penal conscripts were returned from service. Several local officials were put on trial and the governor of Mogilev was severely censured. This took place in November 1844 after the Mrs. Laval community had for nine long months tasted the horrors of a state of siege. The synagogues were filled with Jews praising God for the relief granted to them. The community decreed to commemorate annually the day before Purim on which the UK's inflicting severe punishment on the Jews of Mrs. Laval was promulgated as a day of fasting and to celebrate the third day of months of kiss left on which the cruel UK's was revoked as a day of rejoicing. Had all the disasters of that era had been perpetuated in the same manner, the Jewish calendar would consist entirely of these commemorations of national misfortunes, whether in the form of ordinary persecutions or extraordinary afflictions. End of Section 6. Section 7 of History of the Jews in Russia in Poland. Volume 2. From the deaths of Alexander I until the deaths of Alexander III. 1825 to 1894. By Szymon Dubnop. Translated by Israel Friedlander. This live reverts recording is in the public domain. Recording by SS Kim. Seoul. South Korea. Chapter 15. The Jews in the Kingdom of Poland. Part 1. 1. Plans of Jewish Emancipation. Special mention must be made of the position occupied by the Jews in the vast province which had been formed in 1815 out of the territory of the former Duchy of Warsaw and annexed by Russia under the name of Kingdom of Poland. This province which from 1815 to 1830 enjoyed full autonomy with the local government in Warsaw and the parliamentary constitution handled the affairs of its large Jewish population numbering between 300 to 400,000 souls independently and without regard to the legislation of the Russian Empire. Even after the insurrection of 1830 when subdued Poland was linked more closely with the empire, the Jews continued to be subject to a separate provincial legislation. The Jews of the Kingdom remained under the tutelage of local guardians who were assiduously engaged in solving the Jewish problem during the first part of this period. The initial years of autonomous Poland were a time of storm and stress. After having experienced the resistitude of the period of partitions and the hopes and disappointment of the Napoleonic era, the Polish people clutched eagerly at the shreds of political freedom which were left to it by Alexander I in the shape of the constitutional regulation of 1815. The Polish brought to bear upon the upbuilding of the new Kingdom all the other of the national soul and all the enthusiasm for political regeneration. The feverish organizing activity between 1815 and 1820 was attended by a violent outburst of national sentiment and such moments of enthusiasm were always accompanied in Poland by an intolerant and unfriendly attitude towards the Jews. With a few shining exceptions, the Polish statesmen were far removed from the idea of Jewish emancipation. They favored either correctional or punitive method, though modeled after the pattern of Western European rather than of primitive Russian anti-Semitism. In 1815, the professional government in Warsaw appointed a special committee under the chairmanship of Count Adam Czartowski to consider the agrarian and the Jewish problem. The committee drew up a general plan of Jewish reorganization which was marked by the spirit of enlightened patronage. In theory, the committee was ready to concede to the Jews, human and civil rights, even to the point of considering the necessity of their final emancipation. But in view of the ignorance, the prejudices and the moral corruption to be observed among the lower classes of the Jewish and the Polish people, the patrician members of the committee in charge of the agrarian and Jewish problem accorded an equal share of compliments to the Jews and the Polish peasants. Immediate emancipation was, in their opinion, bound to prove harmful since it would confer upon the Jews freedom of action to the detriment of the country. It was therefore necessary to demand, as a prerequisite for Jewish emancipation, the improvement of the Jewish message which was to be effected by removal from the injurious deco-trade and inducement to engage in agriculture by abolishing the cars, i.e. their communal autonomy, and by changing the Jewish school system to meet the civic requirements. In order to gain the confidence of the Jews for the proposed reforms, the committee suggested that the government should invite the enlightened representatives of the Jewish people to participate in the discussion of the project measures of reform. Turning their eyes toward the West, where Jewish assimilation had already begun its course, the Polish committee decided to approach the Jewish reformer David Friedländer of Berlin, who was, so to speak, the official philosopher of Jewish emancipation, and to solicit his opinion concerning the ways and means of bringing about a reorganization of Jewish life in Poland. The Bishop of Kujabija, Marczewski addressed himself in the name of the Polish government to Friedländer, calling upon him a pupil of Mendelssohn, the educator of Jewry, to state his views on the proposed Jewish reforms in Poland. Flattered by this invitation, Friedländer hastened to compose an elaborate opinion on the improvement of the Jews in the Kingdom of Poland. According to Friedländer, the Polish Jews had, in point of culture, remained far beyond their western core religionists, because their progress had been hampered by their Talmudic training, the pernicious doctrine of Hasidism, and the self-government of their kahls. All these influences ought therefore to be combated. The Jewish school should be brought into closer contact with the Polish school. The Hebrew language should be replaced by the language of the country, and altogether, assimilation and religious reform should be encouraged. While promoting religious and cultural reforms, the government, in the opinion of Friedländer, ought to confirm the Jews in the belief that they would receive in time civil rights if they were to endeavor to perfect themselves in the spirit of the regulation issued for them. This flunkish notion of the necessity of deserving civil rights coincided with the views of the official Polish committee in Warsaw. Soon afterwards, a memorandum prepared by the committee was submitted through its chairman, Count Czartorowski, to the Polish victory, Czajoncek. Formerly, a comrade of Kosciuszko, Czajoncek later turned from revolutionary into reactionary, who was anxious to curry favor with the supreme commander of the province, Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich. No wonder, therefore, that the plan of the committee, conservative though it was, seemed too liberal for his liking. In his report to Emperor Alexander I, dated March 8, 1816, he wrote as follows. The growth of the Jewish population in your kingdom of Poland is becoming ominous. In 1790, they formed here a 13th part of the whole population. Today, they form no less than an eighth. Sober and resourceful, they are satisfied with little. They earn their livelihood by cheating and, owing to early marriages, multiply beyond measure. Showing hard labor, they produce nothing themselves and live only at the expense of the working classes, which they help to ruin. Their peculiar institutions keep them apart within the state, marking them as a foreign nationality, and as a result, they are unable in their present condition to furnish the state either with good citizens or with capable soldiers. Unless means adopted to utilize for the common will the useful qualities of the Jews, they will soon exhaust all sources of the national wealth and will threaten to suppress the Christian population. In the same year, 1816, a scheme looking to the solution of the Jewish question was proposed by the Russian statement Nicholas Novoselcev, the Imperial Commissioner attached to the provincial government in Warsaw. Novoselcev, who was not sympathetic to the post, showed himself in his project to be a friend of the Jews. Instead of the principle laid down by the official committee, correction first and civil rights last. He suggests another more liberal procedure, the immediate bestowal of civil and impart even political rights upon the Jews, to be accompanied by a reorganization of Jewish life along the lines of European progress and modernized scheme of autonomy. All communal and cultural affairs shall be put in charge of direct rates, one central direct rate in Warsaw and local ones in every province of the kingdom, after the pattern of the Jewish consistencies of France. These direct rates shall be composed of rabbis, elders of the community and a commissioner representing the governments. In the central direct rate, this commissioner shall be replaced by a procurator to be appointed directly by the king. This whole organization shall be placed under the jurisdiction of the Minister of Public Instruction, who shall also exercise the right of conforming the rare wise nominated by the direct rates. The functions of the direct rates shall include the registration of the Jewish population, the management of the communal finances, the dispensation of charity and the opening of secular schools for Jewish children. A certificate of graduation from such a school shall be required from every young man who applies for a marriage license or for a permit to engage in a craft or to acquire property. All Jews fulfilling the obligations imposed by the present statute shall be accorded full citizenship while those who distinguish themselves in science or art may even be deemed worthy of political rights, not excluding membership in the Polish diet. For the immediate future, Novosilchew advises to refrain from economic restrictions, such as the prohibition of the liquor traffic, though he concedes the advisability of checking its growth and advocates the adoption of a system of economic reforms by stimulating crops and agriculture among the Jews. In the beginning of 1817, Novosilchew's project was laid before the Polish Council of State. It was opposed with great stubbornness by Czartoryski, the Polish Fitzeroi, Zionist statists and other Polish dignitaries, whose hostility was directed not so much against the pro-Jewish plan as against its Russian author. The Council of State appointed a special committee which, after examining Novosilchew's project, arrived at the following conclusions. 1. It is impossible to carry out a reorganization of Jewish life through the Jews themselves. 2. The establishment of a separate cultural organization for the Jews will only stimulate their national aloofness. 3. The complete civil and political emancipation of the Jews is at variance with the Polish constitution, which vouchsafes special privileges to the professors of the dominant religion. In the plenary session of the Polish Council of State, the debate about Novosilchew's project was exceedingly stormy. The Polish members of the Council sent in the project political aims in opposition to the national elements of the country. They emphasized the danger which the immediate emancipation of the Jews would entail for Poland. Let the Jews first become real Poles, exclaimed the referee Kozmian, then it will be possible to look upon them as citizens. When the same gentlemen declared that it was impossible to code citizenship to whole people who first had to be accustomed to cleanliness and cured from leprosy and similar diseases, Zion said burst out laughing and shouted, here, here, these sluts won't get rid of their scar so easily. After such elevating criticism, Novosilchew's project was voted down. The Council inclined to the belief that the psychological moments for bringing about a radical reorganization of the inner life of the Jews had not yet arrived and therefore resolved to limit itself to isolated measures, principally of a correctional and repressive character. Two, political reaction and literary anti-Semitism. Such measures were not long in coming. The only restriction the government of Warsaw failed to carry through was the enforcement of the law of 1812, forbidding the Jews to deal in liquor. This drastic measure was vetoed by Alexander I, owing to the representations of the Jewish deputies in St. Petersburg. And in 1816, the Polish visor was compelled to announce the suspicion of this cruel law, which had hung like the sword of Democlass over the heads of hundreds of thousands of Jews. On the other hand, the Polish government managed in the course of a few years, 1816 to 1823, to put into operation a number of other restrictive laws. Several cities which boasted the ancient right, the non-Polarandist Jews, secured the confirmation of this shameful privilege with the result that the Jews who had settled there during the existence of the Dutch of Warsaw were either expelled or confined to separate districts. In Warsaw, a number of streets were closed to Jewish residents, and all Jewish visitors to the capital were forced to pay a heavy tax for their right of surgeon, the so-called ticket impost, amounting to 15 kopecks, 7.5 cents a day. Finally, the Jews were forbidden to settle within 21 verses of the Austrian and Prussian frontiers. At the same time, the Polish legislators were fair-minded enough to refrain from forcing the Jews these disenfranchised barriers into military service. In 1817, an announcement was made to the effect that so long as the Jews were barred from the enjoyment of civil rights, they would be released from personal military service in Poland, in lieu whereof they were to pay a fixed conscription tax. About the same time, during the third decade of 19th century, was also realized the old-time policy of curtailing the Jewish-Kahal autonomy, though, as will be seen later, this reform did not proceed from the government's fears, but was rather the product of contemporary social movements among the Poles and the Jews. The political literature of Poland manifested at the time a tendency similar to the one which had prevailed during the quadrennial diet. Scores of pamphlets and magazine articles discussed with the polemic author the Jewish problem, the burning question of the day. The old Jewish beta statutes, a member of the Warsaw government who served on the commission of public instruction and religious denominations, resumed his attacks on Judaism. In 1816, he published an article under the title of concerning the causes of the obnoxiousness of the Jews, in which he asserted that the Jews were responsible for Poland's decline. They multiplied with incredible rapidity, forming now no less than an eighth of the population. Should this process continue, the Kingdom of Poland would be turned into a Jewish country and become the laughing stock of the whole of Europe. The Jewish religion is antagonistic to Catholicism. We call them Old Testament believers while they brand us as pagans. It being impossible to expel the Jews from Poland, they ought to be isolated like carriers of disease. They should be concentrated in separate quarters in the cities to facilitate the supervision over them. Only well-deserving merchants and craftsmen who have applied their trade honestly for 5 or 10 years should be allowed to reside outside the ghetto. The same category of Jews, in addition to those married to Christian women, should also be granted the rights of acquiring landed property. The ghetto on the one end of the line, and baptism on the other, this medieval policy did not, in the least, abetch the patriotic reformers of the type of Stasitz. Stasitz's point of view was supported by certain publicists and opposed by others, but all were agreed on the necessity of a system of correction for the Jews. The discussion became particularly heated in 1818 after the convocation and during the sessions of the first Polish diet in Warsaw. Three different tendencies asserted themselves, moderate on anti-Jewish and pro-Jewish tendency. The first was represented by General Vincent Krasinski, a member of the diet. In his observations on the Jews of Poland, he proceeds from the following two-fold premise. The voice of the whole nation is raised against the Jews and it demands their transformation. This titled publicist declares himself an opponent of the Jews as they are at present. He shares the popular dread of their multiplication, the fear of Jewish Poland, and is somewhat skeptical about their being courageous. Nevertheless, he proposes a liberal method of correction, such as the encouragement of big Jewish capital, the promotion of agriculture and handicraft among the Jewish masses, and the bestowal of the rights of citizenship upon those worthy of it. Krasinski was attacked by an anonymous writer in an anti-Semitic pamphlet entitled Remedy Against the Jews. Proceeding from the conviction that no reforms, however well conceived, could have any effect on the Jews, the writer puts the question in a simplified form. Sherry sacrificed the welfare of 3 million Poles to death of 300,000 Jews or vice versa. His answer is just as simple. The Jews should be forced to leave Poland. Emperor Alexander I, the benefactor of Poland ought to be petitioned to rid the country of the Jews by transferring them to the uninhabited steps in the south of Russia, or even on the borders of Great Tatary. The 300,000 Jews might be divided into 300 parties and settled there in the course of one year. The means for expelling and settling the Jews should be furnished by the Jews themselves. This barbarous project allows the idea of a noble-minded Polish army officer, Valerian Lukasinski, radical in politics, who subsequently landed in the dungeon of the Schulzelburg fortress. In his reflections of an army officer concerning the needs of organizing the Jews, published in 1818, Lukasinski advances the thought that the oppression and disfranchisement of the Jews alone responsible for their demoralized condition. They were useful citizens in the golden age of Kassimia the Great and Sigismund the Old when they were treated with kindness. The older lashes the hypocrisy of the Schlachter who holds the Jews to account for ruining the peasant by selling them alcohol in those very taverns which are leased to them by the noble-pans. Lukasinski contends that the Jews will become good citizens once they will be allowed to participate in the civil life of Poland when that life will be founded on democratic principles. The choir of Polish voice was but faintly disturbed by the opinions expressed by the Jews. An otherwise unknown rabbi who calls himself Moses Ben Abraham echoes in his pamphlet the voice of the people of Israel, the sentiments of Jewish orthodoxy. He begs the Polish not to meddle in the inner affairs of Judaism. You refuse to recognize us as brothers then at least respect us as fathers. Look at your genealogical tree with the branches of New Testament and you will find the root in us. Polish culture cannot be foisted upon the Jews. Barbarus as may appear the plan of expelling the Jews from Poland. The persecuted tribe will rather submit to this alternative than renounce its faith and its ancestral customs. The views of the progressive Jews of Poland were voiced by a young pedagogue in Warsaw, subsequently the well-known champion of assimilation, Jacob Tuggenhold. In a treaty entitled Jeruba or World Concerning the Jews, Tuggenhold contends that the Jews have already begun to assimilate themselves to Polish culture. It was now within the power of the government to strengthen this movement by admitting distinguished Jews to civil service. While this literally fuelled concerning the problem of Judaism was raging, an unhealthy movement against the Jews started among the threats of the Polish population. In several localities of the kingdom, there suddenly appeared victims of ritual murder in the shape of dead bodies of children. The discovery of which was followed by a series of legal trials against the Jews, 1815 to 1816. Innocent people were thrown into prison where they languished for years and were subjected to cross examinations, though without the inquisitorial apparatus of ancient Poland. It is impossible to say whether this origin of superstition might have led, had it not been stopped by a word of command from Saint Petersburg. In 1817, as a result of the energetic representations of the deputies of the Jewish people, Sonnenberg and his fellow workers, the Minister of Ecclesiastic Affairs Golidzin gave orders that the UK, which had just been issued by him, forbidding the arbitrary injection of a ritual element into criminal cases, be strictly enforced in the Kingdom of Poland. This action saved the lives of schools of prisons and put a stop to the obscure agitation which endeavoured to revive the medieval specter. The Polish diet of 1818 reflected the same state of mind which had previously found expression in political literature on unmistakable preponderance of the anti-Jewish element. Some of the deputies appealed to Alexander I in their speeches and openly called upon him to give orders to lay before the next session of the diet, a project of Jewish reform with a view to saving Poland from the excessive growth of the Hebrew tribe, which now formed the seventh of all the inhabitants and in a few years will surpass in the numbers the Christian population of the country. For the immediate future, the deputies recommend the enforcement of the suspended law barring the Jews from the liquid traffic and their subjection to military conscription. One might have thought that the diet had no need of extra measures to curb the Jews. It was quite enough that it tacitly sanctioned the prolongation of the 10 years term of Jewish rightlessness which had been fixed by the government of the Varsovian Dutch in 1808. This term ended in 1818 while the first diet of the Kingdom of Poland was holding its sessions, but neither the Polish diet nor the Polish Council of State gave any serious thought to the question whether the government of the province had the right to prolong the disenfranchisement of the Jews. This right was taken for granted by the Polish legislators who were planning even harsher restrictions for the unloved tribe of Hebrews. End of Section 7. Section 8 of History of the Jews in Russia in Poland. Volume 2. From the death of Alexander I until the death of Alexander III. 1825 to 1894. By Szymon Dubnov translated by Israel Friedland. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by SS Kim. Banik Baisha. Portugal. Chapter 15. The Jews in the Kingdom of Poland. Part 2. 3. Assimilationist tendencies among the Jews of Poland. In the beginning of the third decade of the 19th century, the noise caused by the Jewish question had begun to subside both in Polish political circles and in Polish literature. Instead, the agitation within the Jewish ranks became more vigorous. That group of Jews already assimilated or thirsting for assimilation, which on an earlier occasion, during the existence of the Varsuvian Dutch, had segregated itself from the rest of Jewry. Assuming the labor of Old Testament believers occupied a very influential position within the Jewish community of the Polish capital. It was made up of wealthy bankers and merchants and boasted of few men with European education. The members of this group were hankering after German mothers and were anxious to renounce the national separatism of the Jews, which was a standing rebuke in the mouth of their enemies. To these Old Testament believers, the evolution of the Kaham and the limitation of communal self-government to the narrow range of synagogues interests appeared the surest remedy against antisemitism. Behind the abrogation of the communal autonomy, they saw the smiling vision of a Jewish school reform leading to the polarization of Jewish education while in the far off distance they could discern the promised land of equal citizenship. The efforts of the Jewish reformers of Warsaw were now systematically directed toward this goal. In 1820, there appeared an anonymous pamphlet under the title The Petition or Self-Defense of the members of the Old Testament persuasion in the Kingdom of Poland. The main purpose of this publication is to show that the root of the evil lies in the Kahal organization in the elders, rabbis and burial societies who expand enormous sums of taxation money without any control, without the control of the Polish municipality, who oppressed the people by their harems, excommunication and altogether abused their power. It is therefore necessary to abolish this power of the Kahals and transfer it to the Polish municipalities or even Polish authorities. Only then will order be established in the Jewish communities and the Jews will be transformed into useful citizens. The government spheres of Poland were greatly pleased by these utterances of the Old Testament believers of Warsaw. They had long contemplated the curtailment of the autonomy of the Kahals and now the very Jews clamored for it. In consequence, there appeared in 1821 a series of edicts by the Viceroy and various rescripts by the commission of public instruction and religious denominations. Resulting in the demolition of the ancient communal scheme, in each certain forms of self-government but by no means its underlying fundamental principles had become obsolete. These measures were sanctioned by an Imperial UK's, dated December 20, 1821. Decreting the evolution of the Kahals and their substitution by congregational both, whose scope of activity was strictly limited to religious matters, while all civil and fiscal affairs were placed under the jurisdiction of the local Polish administration. The congregational board was to consist of the rabbi, his assistant or substitute, and three trustees or supervisors. At first, the majority of Jewish communities in Poland were indignant at this curtailment of their autonomy and adopted a hostile attitude towards the new communal organization. The supervisors, elected under the congregational board, often refused to serve and the authorities were compelled to appoint them. But in the course of time, the communities became reconciled to the new scheme of congregations or gminas, whose range of activity was gradually widened. In 1830, the suffrage of the Polish Jews within the Jewish communities was restricted by a new law to persons possessed of a certain amount of property. The result was particularly noticeable in Warsaw, where the new state of things helped to strengthen the influence of the group of the Old Testament believers and enable them to gain control of the affairs of the metropolitan community. The leaders of Warsaw Jewry managed soon to establish intimate relations with the Polish government and cooperate with it in bringing about the cultural reforms of the Jews of Poland. In 1825, the Polish government appointed a special body to deal with Jewish affairs. It was called Committee of Old Testament Believers, though composed in the name of Polish officials. It was supplemented by an advisory council consisting of five public spirited Jews and their alternates. Among the members of the committee, which included several prominent Jewish merchants of Warsaw, such as Jacob Berkson, M. Kapski, Solomon Posno, T. Teplitz was also the well-known mathematician Abram Stone, one of the few cultural Jews of that period who remained the steadfast upholder of Jewish tradition. The Committee of Old Testament Believers embarked upon the huge task of civilizing the Jews of Poland and purging the Jewish religion of its superstitious exclusions. The first step taken by the committee was the establishment of a rabbinical seminary in Warsaw for the training of modernized rabbis, teachers, and communal workers. The program of the school was arranged with the view to the polarization of its pupils. The language of instruction was Polish and the teachers of many secular subjects were Christians. No wonder then when the seminary was opened in 1826, Stone refused to accept the post of director which had been offered to him and yielded his place to Anton Eisenbaum, a radical assimilator. The tendency of the school may be gauged from the fact that the Department of Hebrew and Bible was entrusted to Abram Buchna, who had gained notoriety by a German pamphlet entitled, the Nikhti-Kaitetez Talmud, the Worthlessness of the Talmud. Characteristically enough, Buchna had been recommended by the ferocious stupid Abe Shiarini, a member of the Committee of Old Testament Believers, which one might almost suspect was charged with the supervision of Jewish education for no other reason than that to spite the Jews. Shiarini was professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Warsaw. As such, he considered himself an expert in Hebrew literature and cherished the plan of translating the Talmud into French to unveil the secrets of Judaism before the Christian world. In 1828, Shiarini suggested to the Committee of Old Testament Believers to arrange a course in Hebrew archaeology at the Warsaw University for the purpose of acquainting Christian students with rabbinical literature and thus keeping prospective Polish officials with the knowledge of things Jewish. The plan having been approved by the government, Shiarini began to deliver a course of lectures on Judaism. The fruit of these lectures were of French publication, issued in 1829 under the title, Deori de Judaism. It was an ignorant rival upon the Talmud and rabbinism, a worthy counterpart of Eisenman's Judaism exposed. Shiarini did not even shrink from repeating the hideous lie about the use of Christian blood by the Jews. It was taken to task by Jacob Tugendorf in Warsaw and by Jost and Zunz in Germany, yet the evil seed had sunk into the soil. Polish society which had long harbored unfriendly sentiments against the Jews became more and more permeated with antisemitic bias. And these bias found tangible expression during the insurrection of 1830 to 1831. 4. The Jews and the Polish insurrection of 1831. When, under the effect of the July Revolution in Paris, the November insurrection of 1830 broke out in Warsaw, it put on its matter that section of Polish Jewry who hoped to improve the Jewish lot by their patriotic art. In the month of December, one of the Old Testament delivers, Stanisław Ernis addressed himself to the Polish dictator Kropicki in the name of group of Jewish youth, assuring him of their eagerness to form a special detachment of volunteers to help in the command task of liberating their fatherland. The dictator replied that in as much as the Jews had no civil rights, they could not be permitted to serve in the army. The Minister of War, Morawski, delivered himself on this occasion of the following characteristic utterance. We cannot allow that Jewish blood should mingle with the noble blood of the Poles. What will Europe say when she learns that in fighting for our liberty, we have not been able to get along without Jewish help? The inserting refusal did not cool the other of the Jewish patriots. Josef Berakowicz, son of Berak Juselewicz, who had laid down his life for Polish cause, decided to repeat his father's experiment and issued a proclamation to the Jews calling upon them to join the ranks of the fighters for Polish independence. The national government in Warsaw could not resist this patriotic pressure. It addressed itself to the Congregational Board of Warsaw inquiring about the attitude of the Jewish community towards the projected formation of a separate regiment of Jewish volunteers. The Board replied that the community had already given proofs of its patriotism by contributing 40,000 guldon towards the revolutionary funds and by collecting further contributions towards the equipment of volunteers. The formation of a special Jewish regiment, the Board did not consider advisable in as much as such action was not in keeping with the task of uniting all citizens in the defense of the Fatherland. Instead, the Board favoured the destruction of Jewish volunteers over the whole army. From now on, the Jews were admitted to military service but more into the militia than into the regular army. The commander of National Guard in Warsaw, Anton Ostrowski, one of the few rebel leaders who were not swayed by the antisemitic prejudices of the Polish nobility, admitted into his militia many Jewish volunteers on condition that they shave off their beards. Owing to the religious scruples of many Jewish soldiers, the latter condition had to be abandoned and the special bearded detachment of the Metropolitan Guard was formed, comprising 850 Jews. The Jewish militia created itself nobly of its duty in the grave task of protecting the city of Warsaw against the unrest of the Russian troops. The sons of wealthy families fought shoulder to shoulder with children of the proletariat. The sight of these step-children of Poland fighting for their Fatherland's third, the heart of Ostrowski, and he subsequently wrote, This spectacle could not fail to make your heart ache. Our conscience paid us to attend to the betterment of this most downtrodden part of our population at the earliest possible moment. It is worthy of note that the wave of Polish-Jewish patriotism did not spread beyond Warsaw. In the provincial towns, the inhabitants of the ghetto were, as a rule, unwilling to serve in the army on the ground that the Jewish religion forbade the shedding of human blood. This indifference aroused the eye of the Polish population, which threatened to wreck vengeance upon the Jews, suspecting them of pro-Russian sympathies. Ostrowski's remark with reference to this situation deserves to be quoted. True, he said, the Jews of the provinces may possibly be guilty of indifference towards the revolutionary cause, but can you expect any attitude from those we oppress? It may be added that soon afterwards, the question of military service as affecting the Jews was solved by the diet. By the law of May 30, 1831, the Jews were released from conscription on the payment of a tax, which was four times as large as the one paid by them in the former years. When the aristocratic revolution having failed to obtain the support of the disinherited masses had met with disaster, the revolutionary leaders who saved themselves by fleeing abroad indulged in remorseful reflections. The Polish historian Lelewell, who lived in Paris as a refugee, issued in 1832 a manifesto to the Islamist nation, calling upon the Jews to forget the insults inflicted upon them by present-day Poland, for the sake of the sweet reminiscence of the Polish republic in days gone by and of the hopes inspired by a free Poland in days to come. He compares the flourishing condition of the Jews in the ancient Polish commonwealth with their present status on the same territory under the yoke of the Viennese pharaohs were in the land dominated by the northern Nebuchadnezzar, where the terror of conscription reigns supreme, where little children, wrenched from the embraces of their mothers, hurled into the ranks of a debased soldiery, doomed to become traitors to their religion and nation. Similar utterances could be heard a little later in the mystic circle of Towianski and Mitskewicz in Paris, in each the historic destiny of the two mother nations, the Poles and the Jews, and their universal Meshiani calling for favorite topics of discussion. But alongside of these flights of imprisoned thought, one could frequently catch in the very same circle the sounds of the old antisemitic slogans. The Parisian organ of the Polish refugees, Nova Polska, New Poland, occasionally indulged in antisemitic sales, calling forth a passionate rebuttal from Hurnish, an exiled journalist who reminded his fellow journalists that it was mean to hunt down people who were the slaves of slaves. Two other Polish Jewish revolutionaries, Lublin and Holandelski, shared all the miseries of the refugees and while in exile, indulged in reflections concerning the destiny of their brethren at home. In pacified Poland, which deprived of a former autonomous constitution, was now ruled by the iron hand of the Russian visceral Paskewicz, the Jews at first experienced no palpable changes. Their civil status was regulated as heretofore by formal Polish legislation, not by that of the empire. It was only in 1843 that the Polish Jews were in one respect equalized with the Russian brethren. Instead of the old recruiting tax, they were now forced to discharge military service in person. However, the imperial UK's extending the operation of the conscription statute of 1827 to the Jews of the kingdom contained several alleviations. Above all, its most cruel provision, the conscription of juveniles or Cantonists were set aside. The age of conscription was fixed at 20 to 25, while boys between the age of 12 and 18 were to be trapped only when the parents themselves wished to offer them as substitute for their elder sons who were of military age. Nevertheless, to the Polish Jews who had never known of conscription, military service lasting a quarter of century to be discharged in a strange Russian environment seemed a terrible sacrifice. The Congregational Board of Warsaw, having learned of the UK's center deputation to St. Petersburg with the petition to grant the Jews of the kingdom equalized with the Christians, referring to the law of 1817, which distinctly stated that the Jews were to be released from personal military service so long as they were denied equal civil rights. The petition, of course, proved of no avail. The very term equal rights was still missing in the Russian vocabulary. Only in points of disabilities were the Jews of Poland gradually placed on an equal footing with the Russian brethren. In 1845, the Russian law imposing attacks on the traditional Jewish attire was extended in its operation to the Polish Jews descending with the force of real calamity upon the Hasidic messes of Poland. Fortunately for the Jews of Poland, the other experiments in which St. Petersburg was leveling during that period left them unscathed. The crisis connected with the problems of Jewish autonomy and the Jewish school, which threatened to disrupt Russian Jewry in the 40s, had been passed by the Jews of Poland some 20 years earlier. Moreover, the Polish Jews had the advantage over the Russian brethren in that the abrogated kahl had at all been replaced by another criminal organization, however curtailed it was, and that secular school was not forced upon them in the same brutal manner in which the Russian crown schools had been imposed upon the Jews of the empire. Taken as a whole, the lot of the Polish Jews said though it was, might yet be pronounced enviable when compared with the condition of their brethren in the pale of settlement where the rightlessness of the Jews during that period bordered frequently on martyrdom.