The misunderstanding which had caused this senseless matrimonial panic or _beholoh,_[1] as it was afterwards popularly called, was cleared up by the publication, on April 13, 1835, of the new "Statute on the Jews." To be sure, the new law contained a clause forbidding marriages before the age of eighteen, but it offered no privileges for those already married, so that the only result of the _beholoh_ was to increase the number of families robbed by conscription of their heads and supporters.
[Footnote 1: A Hebrew word, also used in Yiddish, meaning _fright, panic_.] The years of military service were spent by the grown-up Jewish soldiers amidst extraordinary hardships.

They were beaten and ridiculed because of their inability to express themselves in Russian, their refusal to eat _trefa_, and their general lack of adaptation to the strange environment and to the military mode of life.

And even when this process of adaptation was finally accomplished, the Jewish soldier was never promoted beyond the position of a non-commissioned under-officer, baptism being the inevitable stepping-stone to a higher rank.

True, the Statute on Military Service promised those Jewish soldiers who had completed their term in the army with distinction admission to the civil service, but the promise remained on paper so long as the candidates were loyal to Judaism.

On the contrary, the Jews who had completed their military service and had in most cases become invalids were not even allowed to spend the rest of their lives in the localities outside the Pale, in which they had been stationed as soldiers.