were smuggled into Russia.[23] More direct and equally inexplicable, save on the ground of animosity to whatever was not Slavonic, was the ukase to close the Sabbath Schools and the Evening Schools, the only means of educating the laboring men (1870). In 1871, the first of a series of massacres (pogromy) took place in the centre of Jewish culture, Odessa. In 1872, permission was denied to the ladies of that city to organize a society for the purpose of maintaining trade schools, to teach poor Jewish girls handicrafts. The two rabbinical seminaries, of Vilna and Zhitomir, were closed in 1873, and replaced by institutes for teachers, which were managed in the spirit that had prevailed under Nicholas I. And in 1878 the absurd blood accusation, against which four popes, Innocent IV, Paul III, Gregory X, and Clement XIV, issued their bulls, declaring it a baseless and wicked superstition, and which not only the Polish kings Boreslav V, Casimir III, Casimir IV, and Stephen Bathory, but also Alexander I (March 18, 1817), branded as a diabolic invention--that dreadful accusation which even the commission of Nicholas, despite Durnovo's efforts, had denounced as a disgrace and an abomination, was revived by the newspaper Grazhdanin. The ghost of medievalism began to stalk abroad once more in erstwhile enlightened Russia and under the aegis of the Liberator Czar. As often before in Jewish history, the Jews helped not a little to aggravate the untoward conditions. At the instigation of a number of students of the Yeshibah Tree of Life, the doors of that noble institution were closed (1879), to open again after two years of untiring efforts on the part of its self-sacrificing dean, the renowned Naphtali Zebi Judah Berlin. But at the worst this was the result of mistaken zeal for the cause of Haskalah. What was more detrimental was the disgrace brought upon the Jewish name by several converts to Christianity. A certain Jacob Brafmann, having proved a failure in all he undertook, tried at the last the business of Christianity, and succeeded therein. He was appointed professor of Hebrew in the seminary of Minsk, and the Holy Synod charged him with the duty of devising means to promulgate Christianity among the Jews. Finding the times auspicious, he devoted himself to writing libellous articles about his former coreligionists, and wound up with a _Book on the Kahal_ (_Kniga Kahala_, Vilna, 1869), in which he quoted forged "transactions," to the effect that Judaism tolerates and even recommends illegality and immorality among its adherents. In a conference of Jews and Gentiles convoked by Governor-General Kaufman (1871), Barit proved the falsity and forgery of Brafmann's documents. But, as usual, the defence was forgotten, the charges remained.[24] A certain Lutostansky poisoned the public mind by caricaturing the Jews, and aroused an anti-Semitic agitation among his countrymen. The consequence was that even the liberals began to be