The ritual murder trials did not exhaust the “extraordinary” afflictions of Nicholas’ reign.  There were cases of wholesale chastisements inflicted on more tangible grounds, when misdeeds of a few individuals were puffed up into communal crimes and visited cruelly upon entire communities.  The conscription horrors of that period, when the Kahals were degraded to police agencies for “capturing” recruits, had bred the “informing” disease among the Jewish communities.  They produced the type of professional informer, or moser[1], who blackmailed the Kahal authorities of his town by threatening to disclose their “abuses,” the absconding of candidates for the army and various irregularities in carrying out the conscription, and in this way extorted “silence money” from them.  These scoundrels made life intolerable, and there were occasions when the people took the law into their own hands and secretly dispatched the most objectionable among them.

[Footnote 1:  The Hebrew and Yiddish equivalent for “informer.”]

A case of this kind came to light in the government of Podolia in 1836.  In the town Novaya Ushitza two mosers, named Oxman and Schwartz, who had terrorized the Jews of the whole province, were found dead.  Rumor had it that the one was killed in the synagogue and the other on the road to the town.  The Russian authorities regarded the crime as the collective work of the local Jewish community, or rather of several neighboring Jewish communities, “which had perpetrated this wicked deed by the verdict of their own tribunal.”

About eighty Kahal elders and other prominent Jews of Ushitza and adjacent towns, including two rabbis, were put on trial.  The case was submitted to a court-martial which resolved “to subject the guilty to an exemplary punishment.”  Twenty Jews were sentenced to hard labor and to penal military service, with a preliminary “punishment by Spiessruten through five hundred men.” [1] A like number were sentenced to be deported to Siberia; the rest were either acquitted or had fled from justice.  Many of those who ran the gauntlet died under the strokes, and are remembered by the Jewish people in Russia as martyrs.

[Footnote 1:  Both the word and the penalty were introduced by Peter the Great from Germany.  The culprit was made to run between two lines of soldiers who whipped his bare shoulders with rods.  The penalty was abolished in 1863.]

The scourge of informers was also responsible for the Mstislavl affair.  In 1844, a Jewish crowd in the market-place of Mstislavl, a town in the government of Moghilev, came into conflict with a detachment of soldiers who were searching for contraband goods in a Jewish warehouse.  The results of the fray were a few bruised Jews and several broken rifles.  The local police and military authorities seized this opportunity to ingratiate themselves with their superiors, and reported to the governor of Moghilev and the commander of the garrison that the Jews had organized a “mutiny.”  The local informer, Arye Briskin, a converted Jew, found this incident an equally convenient occasion to wreak vengeance on his former coreligionists for the contempt in which he was held by them, and allowed himself to be taken into tow by the official Jew-baiters.