I, p.

190.] The heads of the Russian administration in Lithuania listened eagerly to the sinister revelations of the new Pfefferkorn.

[1] In 1866 Governor-General Kauffmann appointed a commission, which also included a few Jewish experts, to look into the material compiled by Brafman.

This material consisted of the minutes of the Kahal of Minsk from the first half of the nineteenth century, recording the entirely legitimate enactments which the communal administration had passed by virtue of the autonomous rights granted to it by the Government.

Brafman published his material in a series of articles in the official organ of the province, the _Vilenski Vyestnik_, "The Vilna Herald"; the articles were later republished in a separate volume, under the title _Kniga Kahala_, "The Book of the Kahal." [2] The data collected by Brafman were embellished with the customary anti-Semitic quotations from talmudic and rabbinic literature, and put in such a light that the Government was placed on the horns of a dilemma: either to destroy with one stroke the entire Jewish communal organization and all the cultural agencies attached to it, or to run the risk of seeing Russia captured by the "Universal Kahal." It may be added that the _Alliance Israelite Universelle_, which had shortly before been founded in Paris for the purpose of assisting Jews in various countries, figured in Brafman's indictment as a constituent society of the universal Jewish Kahal organization.
[Footnote 1: A medieval convert (died ab.