The members of this group were hankering after German models and were anxious to renounce the national separatism of the Jews which was a standing rebuke in the mouths of their enemies.

To these "Old Testament believers" the abolition of the Kahal and the limitation of communal self-government to the narrow range of synagogue interests appeared the surest remedy against anti-Semitism.

Behind the abrogation of communal autonomy they saw the smiling vision of a Jewish school-reform, leading to the Polonization of Jewish education, while in the far-off distance they could discern the promised land of equal citizenship.
[Footnote 1: See above, p.

96, n.

1.] The efforts of the Jewish reformers of Warsaw were now systematically directed towards this goal.