[Footnote 1:  See above, p. 21, n. 1.]

Encouraged by his success, Lutostanski issued a few years later, in 1879, another libellous work in two volumes, under the title “The Talmud and the Jews,” which exhibits the same crudeness in style and content as his previous achievement—­a typical specimen of a degraded back-yard literature.  The editor of the Hebrew journal ha-Melitz, Alexander Zederbaum, demonstrated clearly that Lutostanski had forged his quotations, and summoned him to a public disputation, which offer was wisely declined.

Nevertheless, the agitation of this shameless impostor had a considerable effect on the highest official spheres in which an ever stronger drift toward anti-Semitism was clearly noticeable.  In 1878 this anti-Semitic trend gave rise to a new ritual murder trial.  The discovery in the government of Kutais, in the Caucasus, of the body of a little Gruzinian girl, named Sarra Modebadze, who had disappeared on the eve of Passover, was deemed a sufficient reason by the judicial authorities to enter a charge of murder against ten local Jews, although the ritual character of the murder was not put forward openly in the indictment.  The case was tried before the District Court of Kutais, and the counsel for the defence succeeded by their brilliant speeches not only to demolish completely the whole structure of incriminating evidence but also to deal a death-blow to the sinister ritual legend.  The case ended in 1879 with the acquittal of all the accused.

Withal, the “ritual” agitation left a nasty sediment in the Russian press.  When in 1879 the famous Orientalist Daniel Chwolson, a convert to Christianity and professor at the Greek-Orthodox Ecclesiastical Seminary of St. Petersburg, who had written a learned apologetic treatise “Concerning the Medieval Accusations against the Jews,” published a refutation of the ritual myth under the title “Do the Jews use Christian Blood?,” he was attacked in the Novoye Vremya by the liberal historian Kostomarov who attempted to disprove the conclusions of the defender of Judaism.  The paper itself, hitherto liberal in its tendency, changed front about that time, and, steering its course by the prevailing moods in the leading Government circles, launched a systematic campaign against the Jews.  The anti-Semitic bacilli were floating in the social atmosphere of Russia and preparing the way for the pogrom epidemic of the following decade.

CHAPTER XX

THE INNER LIFE OF RUSSIAN JEWRY DURING THE REIGN OF ALEXANDER II.

1.  THE RUSSIFICATION OF THE JEWISH INTELLIGENZIA