approved by them to the police for transmission to the Ministry of the Interior.  The regulation involved the entire ancient Hebrew literature printed during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, prior to the establishment of the Russian censorship.  In order to “facilitate the supervision” over new publications or reprints from older editions, all Jewish printing presses which existed at that time in various cities and towns were ordered closed, and only those of Vilna and Kiev, [2] to which special censors were attached, were allowed to remain.

[Footnote 1:  A town in Volhynia.]

[Footnote 2:  The printing-press of Kiev was subsequently transferred to Zhitomir.]

As the Hebrew authors of antiquity or the Middle Ages did not fully anticipate the requirements of the Russian censors, many classic works were found to contain passages which were thought to be “at variance with imperial enactments.”  By the ukase of 1836 all books of this kind, circulating in tens of thousands of copies, had to be transported to St. Petersburg under a police escort to await their final verdict.  The procedure, however, proved too cumbersome, and, in 1837, the emperor, complying with the petitions of the governors, was graciously pleased to command that all these books be “delivered to the flames on the spot.”  This auto-da-fe was to be witnessed by a member of the gubernatorial administration and a special “dependable” official dispatched by the governor for the sole purpose of making a report to the central Government on every literary conflagration of this kind and forwarding to the Ministry of the Interior one copy of each “annihilated” book.

But even this was not enough to satisfy the lust of the Russian censorship.  It was now suspected that even the “dependable” rabbis might pass many a book as “harmless,” though its contents were subversive of the public weal.  As a result, a new ukase was issued in 1841, placing the rabbinical censors themselves under Government control.  All uncensored books, including those already passed as “harmless,” were ordered to be taken away from the private libraries and forwarded to the censorship committees in Vilna and Kiev.  The latter were instructed to attach their seals to the approved books and “deliver to the flames” the books condemned by them.  Endless wagonloads of these confiscated books could be seen moving towards Vilna and Kiev, and for many years afterwards the literature of the “People of the Book,” covering a period of three milleniums, was still languishing in the gaol of censorship, waiting to be saved from or to be sentenced to a fiery death by a Russian official.