despotic power over the communities by employing such weapons as the herem (excommunication) and hazakah (the Jewish legal practice of securing property rights), [3] that it incited the Jewish masses against the State, the Government, and the Christian religion, and fostered in these masses fanaticism and dangerous national separatism.  In the opinion of Brafman, the only way to eradicate this “secret Jewish government,” was to destroy the last vestiges of Jewish communal autonomy by closing all religious and charitable societies and fraternities.  The Jewish community itself ought to share the same fate, and the Jews forming part of it should be included among the Christian estates in the cities and villages.  In a word, Judaism as a communal organization should pass out of existence altogether.

[Footnote 1:  Michael Muravyov (see above, p. 183) was appointed in 1863 military governor of the governments of Vilna, Kovno, Grodno, Vitebsk, Minsk, and Moghilev, which he endeavored to Russify with relentless cruelty.  He died in 1866.]

[Footnote 2:  See p. 58 et seq.]

[Footnote 3:  More exactly, the acquisition of property by continued and undisturbed possession for a period of time.  This right of acquisition was formerly granted by the Kahal on the payment of a certain tax; see Vol.  I, p. 190.]

The heads of the Russian administration in Lithuania listened eagerly to the sinister revelations of the new Pfefferkorn. [1] In 1866 Governor-General Kauffmann appointed a commission, which also included a few Jewish experts, to look into the material compiled by Brafman.  This material consisted of the minutes of the Kahal of Minsk from the first half of the nineteenth century, recording the entirely legitimate enactments which the communal administration had passed by virtue of the autonomous rights granted to it by the Government.  Brafman published his material in a series of articles in the official organ of the province, the Vilenski Vyestnik, “The Vilna Herald”; the articles were later republished in a separate volume, under the title Kniga Kahala, “The Book of the Kahal.” [2] The data collected by Brafman were embellished with the customary anti-Semitic quotations from talmudic and rabbinic literature, and put in such a light that the Government was placed on the horns of a dilemma:  either to destroy with one stroke the entire Jewish communal organization and all the cultural agencies attached to it, or to run the risk of seeing Russia captured by the “Universal Kahal.”  It may be added that the Alliance Israelite Universelle, which had shortly before been founded in Paris for the purpose of assisting Jews in various countries, figured in Brafman’s indictment as a constituent society of the universal Jewish Kahal organization.

[Footnote 1:  A medieval convert (died ab. 1521) who wrote against Judaism, especially the Talmud.]

[Footnote 2:  The first edition appeared in 1869, the second in 1871.]