[Footnote 1:  Compare Vol.  I, p. 368.]

Synagogues may not be built in the vicinity of churches.  The Russian schools of all grades are to be open to Jewish children, who “are not compelled to change their religion” (Clause 106)—­a welcome provision in view of the compulsory methods which had then become habitual.  The coercive baptism of Jewish children was provided for in a separate enactment, the Statute on Conscription, which is declared “to remain in force.”  In this way the Statute of 1835 reduces itself to a codification of the whole mass of the preceding anti-Jewish legislation.  Its only positive feature was that it put a stop to the expulsion from the villages which had ruined the Jewish population during the years 1804-1830.

6.  THE RUSSIAN CENSORSHIP AND CONVERSIONIST ENDEAVORS

With all its discriminations, the promulgation of this general statute was far from checking the feverish activity of the Government.  With indefatigable zeal, its hands went on turning the legislative wheel and squeezing ever tighter the already unbearable vise of Jewish life.  The slightest attempt to escape from its pressure was punished ruthlessly.  In 1838 the police of St. Petersburg discovered a group of Jews in the capital “with expired passports,” these Jews having extended their stay there a little beyond the term fixed for Jewish travellers, and the Tzar curtly decreed:  “to be sent to serve in the penal companies of Kronstadt.” [1] In 1840 heavy fines were imposed upon the landed proprietors in the Great Russian governments for “keeping over” Jews on their estates.

[Footnote 1:  A fortress in the vicinity of St Petersburg.]

Considerable attention was bestowed by the Government on placing the spiritual life of the Jews under police supervision.  In 1836 a censorship campaign was launched against Hebrew literature.  Hebrew books, which were then almost exclusively of a religious nature, such as prayer-books, Bible and Talmud editions, rabbinic, cabalistic, and hasidic writings, were then issuing from the printing presses of Vilna, Slavuta, [1] and other places, and were subject to a rigorous censorship exercised by Christians or by Jewish converts.  Practically every Jewish home-library consisted of religious works of this type.  The suspicions of the Government were aroused by certain Jewish converts who had insinuated that the foreign editions of these works and those that had appeared in Russia itself prior to the establishment of a censorship were of an “injurious” character.  As a result, all Jewish home-libraries were subjected to a search.  Orders were given to deliver into the hands of the local police, in the course of that year, all foreign Hebrew prints as well as the uncensored editions, published at any previous time in Russia, and to entrust their revision to “dependable” rabbis.  These rabbis were instructed to put their stamp on the books approved by them and return the books not