[Footnote 1:  According to the official figures, quoted in the memorandum, the number of Jews in the three South-western governments, i.e., Volhynia, Podolia, and the Kiev province, amounted to 721,080.  Of these, 14 per cent lived in rural districts and 86 per cent in cities and towns.  They owned 27 sugar refineries out of 105; 619 distilleries out of 712; 5700 mills out of 6353; and so forth.  The production of the industrial establishments in the hands of the Jews reached the sum of seventy million rubles.]

A similar tone was adopted in the other official documents which came into the hands of the “Committee for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Jews.”  The communications of the governors and the reports of the members of the Committee were all animated by the same spirit, the spirit that spoke through Brafman’s “Book of the Kahal.”  This was but natural.  The officials, to whom this book had been sent by the central Government “for guidance,” drew from it their whole political wisdom in things Jewish, and in their replies endeavored to fall in with the instructions of the Council of State, conveyed to them by the Committee, viz., “to consider ways and means to weaken the communal cohesion among the Jews.”

In the Kingdom of Poland the governors complained similarly in their reports that the Jews of the province, though accorded equal rights by Vyelepolski, [1] had not complied with the conditions attached to that act, to wit, “to abandon the use of their own language and script, in exchange for the favors bestowed upon them.”  Outside of a handful of assimilated “Poles of the Mosaic Persuasion,” who were imbued with Polish chauvinism, [2] the hasidic rank and file was permeated by extreme separatism, fostered by “the Kahal through its various agencies, the Congregational Boards, the rabbinate, the heders, and a host of special institutions.”

[Footnote 1:  See above, p. 181.]

[Footnote 2:  And hence objectionable from the Russian point of view.]

These and similar communications formed the groundwork of the reports, or more correctly, the bills of indictment in which the members of the Committee charged the Jews with the terrible crime of constituting “a religio-political caste,” in other words, a nationality.  Following the lead of Brafman, the members of the Committee laid particular emphasis in their reports on the obnoxiousness of the Talmud and the danger of Jewish separatism.  Needless to say, the conclusions offered by them were of the kind anticipated in the instructions of the Council of State:  the necessity of wiping out the last vestiges of Jewish self-government, such as the Jewish community, the school, the mutual relief societies, in a word, everything that tends to foster “the communal cohesion among the Jews.”