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