That he might the more effectively put the Church of Christ to shame—so the Holy Synod proclaimed—Napoleon assembled the Judean Synagogues in France ... and established the Great Synhedrion of the Jews, that same ungodly assembly which had once dared pass the sentence of crucifixion upon our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and he now planneth to unite the Jews, whom the wrath of the Almighty hath scattered over the face of the whole earth, so as to incite them to overthrow the Christian Church and proclaim the pseudo-Messiah in the person of Napoleon.
By these devices the Government, finding itself at its wits' end in the face of a great war, shrewdly attempted to frighten at once the Jewish people by the specter of an anti-Jewish Napoleon and the Orthodox Russians by Napoleon's leaning towards Judaism. The former were made to believe that the Synhedrion was directed against the Jewish religion, and the latter were told that it was established by the Jewish "pseudo-Messiah" for the overthrow of Christianity.
In this precarious situation the Government once more decided to ascertain, by means of a circular inquiry, the views of the representatives of the Jewish communities on the best ways of carrying the "reform" into effect. The ukase of February 19, issued by the Tzar on this occasion, is couched in surprisingly mild terms:
Prompted by the desire to give our subjects of the Jewish nationality another proof of our solicitude about their welfare, we have deemed it right to allow all the Jewish communes in the Governments ... of Vilna, Grodno, Kiev, Minsk, Podolia, Volhynia, Vitebsk, and Moghilev, to elect deputies and to suggest, through them, to the gubernatorial administrators the means which they themselves consider best fitted for the most successful execution of the measures laid down in the Statute of 1804.
The deputies were summoned this time, not to St. Petersburg, but to the provincial capitals in order to present their opinions to the governors.
The expression of opinion on the part of the Jewish deputies, or, as they were officially styled, "the attorneys of the Jewish communes," did not limit itself to the fatal thirty-fourth clause, which all the deputies wished to see repealed or at least postponed for an indefinite period. Serious objections were raised also to the other provisions of the "Jewish Constitution." The deputies advocated the abolition of double taxation for all classes of the Jewish population; they asked for a larger range of authority for the rabbinical tribunals and for a mitigation of the provisions forbidding the use of Hebrew in legal documents, promissory notes, and commercial ledgers. Some of them pleaded for a postponement of the law concerning Hebrew as being inconvenient to business, while others suggested permitting the use of Hebrew for promissory notes up to the sum of one hundred rubels.[248]
The deputies also called attention to the difficulty, on the part of the rabbis and Jewish members of the magistracies, of acquiring the Russian language within so short a period. They were ready to assent to the change of dress for the magistrates and those living temporarily outside the Pale. But they pointed out at the same time that the prescribed German dress was not becoming to Jews, who on account of religious scruples refused to shave their beards, and that in the case of magistrates and visitors to the Russian interior they would prefer to adopt the Russian form of dress. As for the laws relating to education, the deputies observed that it would be useless for Jewish children to go to the common Russian schools as long as they did not understand the Russian language, and that it would for this reason seem more practicable first to have them acquire the Russian language in the Jewish schools, where they are taught the Hebrew language and the "dogmas of the faith."
By the time the opinions of the deputies were conveyed by the governors to St. Petersburg, the political sentiment there had undergone a change. In July, 1807, the Peace of Tilsit had been concluded. An entente cordiale had been established between Napoleon and Alexander I., and Russia no more stood in awe of Bonaparte's "intrigues." There was no more reason to fear a secret understanding between the Russian Jews and the Parisian Synhedrion, which had shortly before been prorogued, and the bureaucratic compassion for the unfortunate Jews vanished into air. The last term set for the expulsion from the villages, January 1, 1808, was drawing near, and two months before this date, on October 19, 1807, the Tzar addressed an ukase, marked by extraordinary severity, to the Governor-General of the Western region:
The circumstances connected with the war—the ukase states in part—were of a nature to complicate and suspend the transplantation of the Jews.... These complications can now, after the cessation of the war, be averted in the future by means of a gradual and most convenient arrangement of the work of transplantation.... For these reasons we deem it right to lay down an arrangement by means of which the transplantation of the Jews, beginning with the date referred to above, may be carried into effect, without the slightest delay and mitigation.