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The Haskalah Movement in Russia by Jacob S. Raisin
page 37 of 309 (11%)
settlements, with synagogues and schools and a system of education of
the kind described in the preceding chapter, and we hear of the Council
of Lithuania struggling to re-establish and cement the shattered
foundation of their self-government. Yet all their efforts improved the
demoralized condition of the country but little. As always in national
crises, the individual was sacrificed to the community, and deprived of
the few rights remaining to him. The kehillot became brutally
oppressive. There were no longer men of the stamp of Abraham Rapoport,
Solomon Luria, Mordecai Jaffe, and Meïr Katz, to put their feet on the
neck of tyranny. Without special permission no one could buy or sell, or
move from one place to another, or learn a trade or practice a
profession. Rabbinism became synonymous with rigorism, the coercion of
untold customs became unbearable, and the spirit of Judaism was lost in
a heap of innumerable rites. The Jew's every act had to be sanctioned by
religion. He knew of the outward world only from the heavy taxes he paid
in order to be allowed to exist, and from the bloody riots with which
his people was frequently visited.

What could result from such a state of affairs but poverty, material and
spiritual, with all the suffering it engenders? Those at the head of the
kehillot, being responsible solely to the Government, often had to
deliver the full tale of bricks like the Jewish overseers in Egypt,
though no straw was given to them. On one occasion Rabbi Mikel of Shkud
was arrested because the kahal could not pay the thousand gulden it
owed. In 1767, the whole kahal of Vilna went to Warsaw to protest
against intolerable taxation. Such protests were usually of little
avail. On the other hand, a few powerful families throve at the expense
of their oppressed coreligionists. This aroused a spirit of animosity
and a clamor for the abolition of the kahal institution. Jewish autonomy
was more and more encroached upon. Rabbinates were bought and sold, and
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