The question which confronted the Government next was this:  to what extent have the hopes for a fusion of the Jews with the original population been justified by the events?  Here, too, the reply was unsatisfactory.  The naive expectation that a few gratuities offered to the Jews in the shape of privileges would fill them with the eager desire to “fuse” with the Russians did not come true.  Strong as was the trend towards Russification in the new Jewish intelligenzia of the sixties, the broad masses of Jewry knew nothing of such a tendency.  The authorities became suspicious:  what if these crafty Hebrews should fool us again and refuse to pay for the donated rights by fusing with the Christians?  Russian officialdom received new food for reflection which was to last it for years, nay, for decades.

2.  THE INFORMER JACOB BRAFMAN

Several occurrences were instrumental in determining the Government to embark upon a new policy, that of investigating assiduously the inner life of the Jews.  At the end of the sixties a man appeared in Vilna who offered his services to the authorities as a detective and spy among the Jews.  Jacob Brafman, a native of the government of Minsk, had deserted his race and religion in the last years of Nicholas’ conscription, hoping thereby to escape the nets of the vigilant Kahal “captors” who wished to draft him into the army.  Embittered against the Kahal agents who had become mere police tools, Brafman desired to wreak vengeance upon the Kahal as a whole, nay, upon the very idea of a Jewish communal organization.

When the “fusion,” or assimilation, of the Jews became the watchword of the highest official circles, the astute convert found that he could make his way by exposing the influences which in his opinion checked the endeavors of the Government.  A memorandum presented by him to Alexander II., when the latter was passing through Minsk in 1858, opened to him the doors of the Holy Synod.  He was appointed instructor of Hebrew at a Greek-Orthodox seminary and entrusted with the task of finding ways to remove the difficulties placed by the Jews in the path of their coreligionists intending to go over to Christianity.  His mission to facilitate apostasy among the Jews proved a failure, and his services as detective were not yet appreciated during the liberal years of Alexander’s reign.

However, with the reactionary turn in Russian politics, in the middle of the sixties, these services were once more in demand.  Brafman hastened to the hot-bed of reactionary chauvinism, the city of Vilna, which was firmly held in the iron grip of Muravyov, [1] and there began “to expose the separatism of the inner life of the Jews” before the highest administration of the province.  He contended that the Kahal, though officially abolished in 1844, [2] continued in reality to exist and to maintain a widely ramified judiciary (Bet Din), that it constituted a secret, uncanny sort of organization which wielded