Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 10, 2025
The term used to designate the assembly of the faithful was the Hebrew Kahal, which was rendered by the essentially democratic word Ecclesia, which is the convocation of the people in the ancient Grecian cities, the summons to the Pnyx or the Agora.
Hardly has he set foot upon the soil of his native town when he is arrested and thrown into prison. The Kahal had made out a passport in his name for the cobbler's son, a degraded character, a highway robber and sneak thief, and charged with murder. Now the true Joseph ben Simon is to expiate the crime of the other. It is vain for him to protest his innocence.
For, despite all the endeavors of the Society to adapt itself to the official point of view, it was regarded with suspicion by the powers that be, having been included by the informer Brafman among the constituent organizations of the dreadful and mysterious "Jewish Kahal." The Russian assimilators, now branded as separatists, found themselves in a tragic conflict.
His Majesty's Hebrew subjects are deprived of their congregational unions known by the Hebrew term Kahal, and are thus debarred from the advantage of any great measure for their common relief, which might otherwise be effected through the community.
The president of the Kahal, before whom he is arraigned, declares there is no other Joseph ben Simon, and he is the guilty one. The little town is described minutely. We are on the public square, the market place, the dumping ground of all the offal and dirt, whence an offensive odor rises in the nostrils of the passer-by. Facing this square is the synagogue, a mean, dilapidated building.
The Kahal elders it will be remembered that they continued to exist after the abrogation of the Kahals, acting as the fiscal agents of the Government now faced a terrible alternative: to become, in the words of a contemporary, "either murderers of martyrs," i.e., either to capture and send into the army any youth or boy, without discrimination, or themselves to don the gray uniform and be impressed into military services as "penal" recruits.
They produced the type of professional informer, or moser , who blackmailed the Kahal authorities of his town by threatening to disclose their "abuses," the absconding of candidates for the army and various irregularities in carrying out the conscription, and in this way extorted "silence money" from them.
They contain an acrimonious description of Jewish life in the time of Nicholas I. No Jewish artist had ever yet dipped his brush in colors so dismal and had displayed so ferocious a hatred as did Bogrov in painting the old Jewish mode of life within the Pale, with its poverty and darkness, its hunters and victims, its demoralized Kahal rule of the days of conscription.
The Kahal served as a central point in which every individual had an interest, and there were able to do something for the amelioration of their own town in particular cases, which cannot be done now. The Israelites, under these circumstances, greatly suffer from the dissolution of their congregational unions.
They described it as a Chinese wall shutting the Jews in and shutting the world out. It is becoming more and more plainly recognized and admitted, that it was, in reality, an attempt at reform rendered imperative by the tyranny of the kahal, the rigorism of the rabbis, the superciliousness of the learned classes, and the superstition of the masses.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking