the rank and file of tavern keepers, both rural and urban, there had arisen a class of wealthy tax-farmers, who kept a monopoly on the sale of liquor or the collection of excise in various governments of the Pale.  They functioned as the financial agents of the exchequer, while the Jewish employees in their mills, store-houses, and offices acted as their sub-agents, forming a class of “officials” of their own.  The place next in importance to the liquor traffic was occupied by retail and wholesale commerce.  The crafts and the spiritual professions came last.  Pauperism was the inevitable companion of this economic organization, and “people without definite occupations” were counted by the hundreds of thousands.

6.  THE RITUAL MURDER TRIAL OF VELIZH

The “ordinary” persecutions under which the Jews in Russia were groaning were accompanied by afflictions of an extraordinary kind.  The severest among these were the ritual murder trials which became of frequent occurrence, tending to deepen the medieval gloom of that period.  True, ritual murder cases had occurred during the reign of Alexander I., but it was only under Nicholas that they assumed a malign and dangerous form.  In the year 1816, shortly before Passover, a dead body was found in the vicinity of Grodno and identified as that of the four year old daughter of a Grodno resident, Mary Adamovich.  Rumors were spread among the superstitious Christian populace to the effect that the girl had been killed for ritual purposes, and the police, swayed by these rumors, set about to find the culprit among the Jews.  Suspicion fell on a member of the Grodno Kahal, Shalom Lapin, whose house adjoined that of the Adamovich family.  The only “evidence” against him were a hammer and a pike found in his house.  A sergeant, named Savitzki, a converted Jew, appeared as a material witness before the Commission of Inquiry, and delivered himself of a statement full of ignorant trash, which was intended to show that “Christian blood is exactly what is needed according to the Jewish religion”—­here the witness referred to the Bible story of the Exodus and to two mythical authorities, “the philosopher Rossie and the prophet Azariah.”  He further deposed that “every rabbi is obliged to satisfy the whole Kahal under his jurisdiction by smearing with same (with Christian blood) the lintels of every house on the first day of the feast of Passover.”  Prompted by greed and by the desire to distinguish himself, the sergeant declared himself ready to substantiate his testimony from Jewish literature, “if the chief Government will grant him the necessary assistance.”

The results of this “secret investigation” were laid before the governor of Grodno and reported by him to St. Petersburg.  In reply, Alexander I. issued a rescript in February, 1817, ordering that the “secret investigation be cut short and the murderer be found out” intimating thereby that search be made for the criminal and not for the tenets of the Jewish religion.  However, all efforts to discover the culprit failed, and the case was dismissed.