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."]

Characteristically enough, Buchner had been recommended by the ferocious
Jew-baitor Abbe Chiarini, a member of the "Committee of Old Testament
Believers," which, one might almost suspect, was charged with the
supervision of Jewish education for no other reason, than that to spite
the Jews. Chiarini was professor of Oriental Languages at the University
of Warsaw. As such he considered himself an expert in Hebrew literature,
and cherished the plan of translating the Talmud into French to unveil
the secrets of Judaism before the Christian world. In 1828 Chiarini
suggested to the "Committee of Old Testament Believers" to arrange a
course in Hebrew Archaeology at the Warsaw University for the purpose of
acquainting Christian students with rabb