minded persons.

The signers of this solemn pronouncement were evidently unaware of the
degrading renunciation of national rights which was implied in the
declaration that not only had the Jews lost their former comprehensive
communal organization--this was in accordance with the facts--but that,
were such an inner autonomous organization to exist, they would regard
it as a criminal offence, subversive of the public order and punishable
by the forfeiture of civil rights.




CHAPTER XXIV


LEGISLATIVE POGROMS

1. THE "TEMPORARY RULES" OF MAY 3, 1882

During the interval between the pogrom of Warsaw and that of Balta the
Government was preparing for the Jews a series of legislative pogroms.
In the recesses of the Russian Government offices, which served as the
laboratories of police barbarism, the authorities were busy forging a
chain of legal and administrative restrictions in order to "regulate"
Jewish life in the spirit of complete civil disfranchisement. The
Central Committee on Jewish Affairs, attached to the Ministry of the
Interior, which was called for short "the Jewish Committee" but might
far more appropriately have been called "the Anti-Jewish Committee," was
basing its labors upon the opinions submitted by the gubernatorial