At first, the majority of Jewish communities in Poland were indignant at this curtailment of their autonomy, and adopted a hostile attitude towards the new communal organization.  The “supervisors” elected on the Congregational Boards often refused to serve, and the authorities were compelled to appoint them.  But in the course of time the communities became reconciled to the new scheme of congregations, or Gminas,[1] whose range of activity was gradually widened.  In 1830 the suffrage of the Polish Jews within the Jewish communities was restricted by a new law to persons possessed of a certain amount of property.  The result was particularly noticeable in Warsaw where the new state of things helped to strengthen the influence of the group of the “Old Testament believers” and enabled them to gain control of the affairs of the metropolitan community.  The leaders of Warsaw Jewry managed soon to establish intimate relations with the Polish Government, and co-operated with it in bringing about the “cultural reforms” of the Jews of Poland.

[Footnote 1:  Gmina is the Polish word for community, derived from the German Gemeinde.]

In 1825 the Polish Government appointed a special body to deal with Jewish affairs.  It was called “Committee of Old Testament Believers,” though composed in the main of Polish officials.  It was supplemented by an advisory council consisting of five public-spirited Jews and their alternates.  Among the members of the Committee, which included several prominent Jewish merchants of Warsaw, such as Jacob Bergson, M. Kavski, Solomon Posner, T. Teplitz, was also the well-known mathematician Abraham Stern, one of the few cultured Jews of that period who remained a steadfast upholder of Jewish tradition.  The “Committee of Old Testament Believers” embarked upon the huge task of civilizing the Jews of Poland and purging the Jewish religion of its superstitious excrescences.

The first step taken by the Committee was the establishment of a Rabbinical Seminary in Warsaw for the training of modernized rabbis, teachers, and communal workers.  The program of the school was arranged with a view to the Polonization of its pupils.  The language of instruction was Polish, and the teachers of many secular subjects were Christians.  No wonder then that when the Seminary was opened in 1826, Stern refused to accept the post of director which had been offered to him, and yielded his place to Anton Eisenbaum, a radical assimilator.  The tendency of the school may be gauged from the fact that the department of Hebrew and Bible was entrusted to Abraham Buchner, who had gained notoriety by a German pamphlet entitled Die Nicktigkeit des Talmuds, “The Worthlessness of the Talmud.” [1]

[Footnote 1:  He was also the author of a Jewish catechism in Hebrew, entitled Yesode ha-Dat, “The Fundamental Principles of the Jewish Religion.”]