As for the inner life of this Jewish mass of one million souls, it displays the same saddening spectacle of disintegration. The social rottenness of the environment, the poison of the decaying body of Poland, worked its way into Jewish life, and began to undermine its foundations, once so firmly grounded. The communal autonomy, which had been the mainstay of public Jewish life, was unmistakably falling to pieces. In the southwestern region, in Podolia, Volhynia, and Galicia,--the last having been annexed by Austria,--it had been shattered by the great religious split produced by Hasidism. The Kahal organization was tottering to its fall, either because of the division of the community into two hostile factions, the Hasidim and Mithnagdim, or because of the inertia of the Hasidic majority, which, blindly obeying the dictates of the Tzaddik, was incapable of social organization. In the northwestern region, in Lithuania and White Russia,--the latter having become a Russian province--the rabbinical party, going hand in hand with the Kahal authorities, was superior to the forces of Hasidism. Nevertheless the Kahal organization was infected by the general process of degeneration, which had seized the country at large in the partition period. The Jewish plutocracy followed the example of the Polish pans in exploiting the poor laboring masses. The rabbinate, like the Polish clergy, catered to the rich. The secular and the ecclesiastic oligarchy, which controlled the Kahal, victimized the community by a shockingly disproportionate assessment of state and communal taxes, throwing the main burden on the impecunious classes, and thus bringing them to the verge of ruin. The _parnasim_, or wardens, of the community, as well as the rabbis, were occasionally found guilty of embezzlement, usury, and blackmail. The oppression of the Kahal oligarchy went to such lengths that the suffering masses, unmindful of the traditional prohibition to appeal to the "law courts of the Gentiles," frequently sought to obtain redress from the Christian administration against these Jewish satraps. In 1782 representatives of the lower classes, principally artisans, of the Jewish population of Minsk, lodged a complaint with the Lithuanian Financial Tribunal against the local Kahal administration, which "was completely ruining the community of Minsk." They alleged that the Kahal leaders embezzled the receipts from taxation, and misappropriated the surplus for their own benefit, that by means of the herem (excommunication) they squeezed all kinds of revenues from the poor and appropriated their hard-earned pennies. The complainants add that for their attempt to lay bare the misdoings of the Kahal before the administration, they had been arrested, imprisoned, and pilloried in the synagogue by order of the Kahal wardens.