R

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 Mst