They were exposed to expulsions from the villages, and their commercial
and other privileges had been considerably curtailed. Besides, a new
scourge was inflicted upon them, compulsory service in the army, unknown
until then, a frightful service, with an active period of twenty-five
years. Children were torn from their families and their faith, and the
whole life of a man was swallowed up. They struggled against this new
incubus with all the weapons at the disposal of a feeble population.
Bribery, premature marriage, wholesale evasion, voluntary or forced
substitution, were the means employed by the well-to-do to save their
progeny from military service.

In order to ensure the regular recruiting of soldiers among the Jews,
Czar Nicholas I, while abolishing the central synod organization,
maintained the local _Kahal_ everywhere, and made it responsible
for the military conscription. The wealthy, the learned, the heads of
the communities profited greatly by this official recognition of the
Kahal. It enabled them to free the members of their families from
enrollment in the army. In their hands, it became an instrument for the
oppression and exploitation of the poor. "The devil take the hindmost!"
expresses the state of mind of the Russian Jews in the middle of the
nineteenth century, during the whole of the period called the
_Behalah_ ("Terror").

The reforms projected by Alexander I for the benefit of the Jews, the
hopes cherished by the Lithuanian humanists, proved abortive.
Reactionary tendencies made themselves felt everywhere cruelly, but
chiefly they injured the Jews, forever persecuted, downtrodden, and
humiliated. The profound pessimism of Lebensohn's poetry is eloquent
testimony to the feelings of educated Jews. And yet, these votaries of
knowledge, of civilization, the daughter of heaven, clung to their