tivity of the Government. With
indefatigable zeal, its hands went on turning the legislative wheel and
squeezing ever tighter the already unbearable vise of Jewish life. The
slightest attempt to escape from its pressure was punished ruthlessly.
In 1838 the police of St. Petersburg discovered a group of Jews in the
capital "with expired passports," these Jews having extended their stay
there a little beyond the term fixed for Jewish travellers, and the Tzar
curtly decreed: "to be sent to serve in the penal companies of
Kronstadt." [1] In 1840 heavy fines were imposed upon the landed
proprietors in the Great Russian governments for "keeping over" Jews on
their estates.

[Footnote 1: A fortress in the vicinity of St Petersburg.]

Considerable attention was bestowed by the Government on placing the
spiritual life of the Jews under police supervision. In 1836 a
censorship campaign was launched against Hebrew literature. Hebrew
books, which were then almost exclusively of a religious nature, such as
prayer-books, Bible and Talmud editions, rabbinic, cabalistic, and
hasidic writings, were then issuing from the printing presses of Vilna,
Slavuta, [1] and other places, and were subject to a rigorous censorship
exercised by Christians or by Jewish converts. Practically every Jewish
home-library consisted of religious works of this type. The suspicions
of the Government were aroused by certain Jewish converts who had
insinuated that the foreign editions of these works and those that had
appeared in Russia itself prior to the establishment of a censorship
were of an "injurious" character. As a result, all Jewish home-libraries
were subjected to a search. Orders were given to deliver into the hands
of the local police, in the course of that year, all foreign Hebrew
prints as well as the uncensored editions, published at any previous
time in Russia, and to entrust their revision to "dependable" rabbis.
These rabbis were instructed to put their stamp on the books approved by
them and return the books not approved by them to the police for
transmission to the Ministry of the Interior. The regulation involved
the entire ancient Hebrew literature printed during the sixteenth,
seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, prior to the establishment of the
Russian censorship. In order to "facilitate the supervision" over new
publications or reprints from older editions, all Jewish printing
presses which existed at that time in various cities and