towns were
ordered closed, and only those of Vilna and Kiev, [2] to which special
censors were attached, were allowed to remain.

[Footnote 1: A town in Volhynia.]

[Footnote 2: The printing-press of Kiev was subsequently transferred to
Zhitomir.]

As the Hebrew authors of antiquity or the Middle Ages did not fully
anticipate the requirements of the Russian censors, many classic works
were found to contain passages which were thought to be "at variance
with imperial enactments." By the ukase of 1836 all books of this kind,
circulating in tens of thousands of copies, had to be transported to St.
Petersburg under a police escort to await their final verdict. The
procedure, however, proved too cumbersome, and, in 1837, the emperor,
complying with the petitions of the governors, was graciously pleased to
command that all these books be "delivered to the flames on the spot."
This _auto-da-fe_ was to be witnessed by a member of the gubernatorial
administration and a special "dependable" official dispatched by the
governor for the sole purpose of making a report to the central
Government on every literary conflagration of this kind and forwarding
to the Ministry of the Interior one copy of each "annihilated" book.

But even this was not enough to satisfy the lust of the Russian
censorship. It was now suspected that even the "dependable" rabbis might
pass many a book as "harmless," though its contents were subversive of
the public weal. As a result, a new ukase was issued in 1841, placing
the rabbinical censors themselves under Government control. All
uncensored books, including those already passed as "harmless," were
ordered to be taken away from the private libraries and forwarded to the
censorship committees in Vilna and Kiev. The latter were instructed to
attach their seals to the approved books and "deliver to the flames" the
books condemned by them. Endless wagonloads of these confiscated books
could be seen moving towards Vilna and Kiev, and for many years
afterwards the literature of the "People of the Book," covering a period
of three milleniums, was still languishing in the gaol of censorship,
waiting to be saved from or to be sentenced to a fiery death by a
Russian official.

It is almost unnecessary to add that the primitive method of solving the
Jewish problem by means of conversion, was still the guiding principle
of the Government. The Russian legislation of that period teems with
regulations concerning a