As far as the Jews are concerned, the immediate result of these measures was insignificant. The number of Jews involved in the decree of expulsion from the affected Great Russian Governments was infinitesimal, since, owing to the restriction of the Jewish right of residence, the only Jews occasionally to be found there were a few traveling salesmen or distillers. Yet, indirectly, the Judaizing movement had a harmful effect upon the position of Russian Jewry. The Government circles of St. Petersburg, which were religiously attuned, were irritated by the fact that so many from the Orthodox fold went over to the camp of the very people among whom the Government had been hunting vainly for proselytes, and while the colonies so hospitably prepared for the Israelitish Christians were clamoring for inhabitants, many Great Russian villages had to be stripped of their inhabitants, who were deported to Siberia, on account of their Jewish leanings. In the mind of Golitzin, the Minister of Ecclesiastic Affairs, the opinion gained ground that "the Jews are enjoined by their tenets to convert everybody to their religion." These circumstances produced in Russian official circles a frame of mind conducive to repressive measures, and helped to provide a moral justification for them. Accordingly, the last years of Alexander I.'s reign were marked by a recrudescence of religious oppression, which at times assumed the dimensions of wholesale persecutions. Sentiments of this kind were responsible for the medieval prohibition against keeping Christian domestics. The prohibition was suggested by Golitzin, a man otherwise far removed from anti-Semitic prejudices, and was officially justified in the Senatorial ukase of April 22, 1820, by the alleged proselytism of the Jews. As instances of the latter the Senate quotes the Judaizing movement in the Government of Voronyezh, the communication of the Governor of Kherson concerning certain Christian domestics in Jewish homes, who had adopted Jewish customs and ceremonies, and so forth. The same motives, strengthened by the tendency of removing the Jews from the villages, long since pursued by the Government, suggested harsher restrictions in letting to Jews manorial estates with the peasant "souls" attached to them. Ukases issued in 1819 and in subsequent years enjoin the local administration to prosecute all so-called "krestentzya" contracts, transactions whereby the squire leased the harvest of a given year to a Jew, entitling him to employ the peasants for gathering the grain and hay and for other agricultural labors. Such transactions were looked upon as a criminal encroachment of the Jews upon the right of owning slaves, which was the prerogative of the nobles. Orders were accordingly given, that all such farm leases be taken away from the Jews, in spite of the complete ruin of the Jewish lessees, who were left to settle their accounts with the squires.