Zalman was arraigned before the so-called "Secret Expedition," a department which dealt with crimes of a political nature. A long bill of indictments was read out to him. He was accused of being the founder of a harmful religious sect, which had changed the order of divine service among Jews, of spreading pernicious ideas, and collecting funds for mysterious purposes in Palestine. The cross-examination clearly implied the charge of political disloyalty. To all questions laid before him, the accused gave an elaborate written reply in Hebrew. Zalman's defense, which was translated from the Hebrew into Russian, produced a favorable impression in Government circles. Acting upon the report submitted to him by the Prosecutor-General respecting "all the circumstances revealed by the investigation," Tzar Paul I. issued an order to liberate Zalman and the other sectarian chiefs who had been placed under arrest, but to keep "a strict watch over them as to whether there exists, or is liable to come into existence, a secret relationship or correspondence between them and those who entertain perverted notions concerning the authorities and the form of Government." Towards the end of 1798 Zalman was allowed to return home, and the other prisoners were likewise set at liberty.
Now it was the turn of the Hasidim to retaliate on their persecutors. In view of the fact that the persecutions against them had been instigated by the Kahal elders of Vilna, who had composed the "Committee of Five," the Hasidim made up their mind to depose these elders and put their own partisans in their places. With the help of bakhshish the Vilna Hasidim managed to secure the good-will of the gubernatorial administration. In the beginning of 1799 they lodged a complaint with the local authorities against the Kahal elders, charging them with having perpetrated all kinds of abuses, including the embezzlement of public funds. This action resulted in the removal and imprisonment of several elders. Under official pressure their places were filled by new elders, who either were themselves Hasidim or had been recommended by them. The community of Vilna was rent in twain. One section remained true to the dismissed elders, the other stood up for the newly-elected. The warring factions were busy sending complaints and denunciations directed against each other to the Government in St. Petersburg. The canker of "informing," which, perhaps not accidentally, had developed in the first years of Russian rule in Lithuania, brought to the front one hideous personality, a rabbi-informer by the name of Avigdor Haïmovich (son of Hayyim), of Pinsk.
Avigdor, formerly rabbi of Pinsk and the surrounding district, had been dismissed from office owing to the intrigues of the Hasidic members of the community, who were his opponents. What Avigdor lamented most was the loss of revenue. For a long time the dethroned shepherd had been dragging his flock through the magistracies and law courts. Having failed in his efforts, he decided to wreak vengeance upon the leader of the sect responsible for his ruin. In the beginning of 1800 Avigdor addressed an elaborate petition to Tzar Paul I., in which he described the Hasidic sect as "a pernicious and dangerous organization," which was continuing the work of the former Messianic Sabbatians. By a vast array of distorted quotations from Hasidic literature the informer endeavored to prove that the teachers of the sect enjoined upon their followers to fear only God and not men, in other words, to disregard the authorities, including the Tzar.
The denunciation was allowed to take its course. Early in November of the same year, the Tzaddik Zalman Borukhovich was rearrested in Lozno and dispatched to St. Petersburg under the convoy of two Senatorial couriers. On his arrival in the capital the Tzaddik was incarcerated in the fortress, and after a cross-examination confronted with his accuser Avigdor. Zalman again replied in writing to the indictments against him, which now mounted up to nineteen counts. He repudiated emphatically the charge of not recognizing the authority of the Government, of immorality, of collecting money, and arranging meetings for secret purposes. Towards the end of November Zalman was set at liberty, but was ordered to remain in St. Petersburg pending the examination of his case by the Senate, to which it had now been transferred from the Secret Expedition. While the Senate was preparing to take up the case, the palace revolution of March, 1801, cut short Paul's reign, and placed Alexander I. upon the throne. The political wind veered round, and on March 29, 1801, the new Tzar gave Zalman permission to depart from St. Petersburg.
Having satisfied itself that the religious schism in Judaism was perfectly harmless from the political point of view, the Government was ready to give it its sanction. One of the clauses of the Statute of 1804 permits the sectarians to establish their own synagogues in every community and to elect their own rabbis, with the sole stipulation that the Kahal administration in each city shall remain one and the same for all sections of the community. As a matter of fact, the law merely recognized what had already become the living practice. The religious split had long been an accomplished fact, and the internecine strife of 1796-1801 was merely its final act. As for the communal organization of the Jews, which had already been undermined by the political changes, the schism proved nothing short of disastrous. The Kahals, weakened by inner struggles and demoralized by denunciations and bureaucratic interference, failed to present a united front in the first years of Alexander's reign, when the Government was carrying out its "plan of reform," and invited the Kahal leaders to share in its labors. The communities of the Southwest, which were completely under the ban of Hasidic mysticism, reacted feebly to the social and economic crisis facing them. The Jewish delegates who presented their views in reply to the official inquiries of 1803 and 1807[259] were recruited principally from the White Russian and Lithuanian Governments, where the political sense of the Jews had not yet been completely dulled.
3. Rabbinism, Hasidism, and Enlightened "Berlinerdom"
While in Western Europe the old forms of Jewish life were breaking up, the cultural development of the Jewish masses of Eastern Europe remained stationary. The two dominating forces in their spiritual life, Rabbinism and Hasidism, watched with equal zeal over the maintenance of the old order of things. The traditional form of education remained unchanged. The old school, the heder and yeshibah, with its exclusive Talmudic training, supplied its pupils with a vast amount of mental energy, but failed to prepare them for practical life, and the girls and women remained entirely outside the influence of the school. Just as firmly established was the old-fashioned scheme of family life, with its early marriages, between the years of thirteen and sixteen, with the prolonged maintenance of such married children in the paternal home, with its excessive fertility in the midst of habitual poverty, with its reduction of physical wants to the point of exhaustion and degeneration. This patriarchal mass of Jews fought shy of all cultural "novelties," and deprecated the slightest attempt to extend its mental and social horizon. Religious culture had not yet had a chance to cross swords with secular culture. The war between Hasidism and Rabbinism was fought on purely religious soil. Its sole issue was the type of the believer: the old discipline with its emphasis upon the scholastic and ceremonial aspect of Judaism was fighting against the onrush of ecstatic mysticism and the blind "cult of saints."
It cannot be said that benumbed Rabbinism revived under the effect of this vehement contest. At the time we are speaking of no distinct traces of such a revival are to be seen, and all one can discern are the signs of a purely scholastic renaissance. The method of textual analysis introduced by Elijah Gaon into Talmudic research, which took the place of the hair-splitting casuistry formerly in vogue, gained ever wider currency and an ever firmer foothold in the yeshibahs of Lithuania.