again been brought up in the gubernatorial
commissions, that the Jews still retained their ancient autonomous Kahal
organization, and that the latter was operating secretly and was
fostering Jewish separatism to the detriment of the other elements of
the population.

The resolution of the conference on this score read as follows:

We, the undersigned, the representatives of various centers of
Jewish settlement in Russia, rabbis, members of religious
organizations and synagogue boards, consider it our sacred duty,
calling to witness God Omniscient, to declare publicly, in the
presence of the whole of Russia, that there exists neither an open
nor a secret Kahal administration among the Russian Jews; that
Jewish life is entirely foreign to any organization of this kind and
to any of the attributes ascribed to such an organization by evil
minded persons.

The signers of this solemn pronouncement were evidently unaware of the
degrading renunciation of national rights which was implied in the
declaration that not only had the Jews lost their former comprehensive
communal organization--this was in accordance with the facts--but that,
were such an inner autonomous organization to exist, they would regard
it as a criminal offence, subversive of the public order and punishable
by the forfeiture of civil rights.

CHAPTER XXIV

LEGISLATIVE POGROMS

1. THE "TEMPORARY RULES" OF MAY 3, 1882

During the interval between the pogrom of Warsaw and that of Balta the
Government was preparing for the Jews a series of legislative pogroms.
In the recesses of the Russian Government offices, which served as the
laboratories of police barbarism, the authorities were busy forging a
chain of legal and administrative restrictions in order to "regulate"
Jewish life in the spirit of complete civil disfranchisement. The
Central Committee on Jewish Affairs, attached to the Ministry of the
Interior, which was called for short "the Jewish Committee" but might
far more appropriately have been called "the Anti-Jewish Committee," was
basing its labors upon the opinions submitted by the gubernatorial
commissions and rearing on this foundation a monstrous structure of
disabilities.

The new project was based upon the following theory: The old Russian
legislation was marked by its hostility to the Jews as a secluded group
of alien faith and race. A departure from this attitude was attempted
during the reign of Alexander II.,