on to the neighboring governments of
Yekaterinoslav and Bessarabia. Stray Jewish agricultural settlements
also appeared in Lithuania and White Russia. But a comparative handful
of some ten thousand "Jewish peasants" could not affect the general
economic make-up of millions of Jews. In spite of all shocks, the
economic structure of Russian Jewry remained essentially the same. As
before, the central place in this structure was occupied by the liquor
traffic, though modified in a certain measure by the introduction of a
more extensive system of public leases. Above 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
delivere