Brafman vs. the qahal
Brafman took a leave of absence from the seminary, before traveling to
Vilna in 1866. Once there, he began writing a series of articles, collectively titled "The View of a Jewish Convert to Orthodoxy on the Jewish Question in Russia", in
Vilenskii Vestnik, an official newspaper, published by the government. Therein, Brafman asserted that the failures of his attempts to convert Jews were caused by the abuses that potential converts would face at the hands of their co-religionists. He also strongly rejected the view of many Russian and Jewish progressives, that Jews would modernize and undergo a significant internal reform if emancipated. In Brafman's view, if prior attempts to reform Judaism had failed, such as the creation of Jewish agricultural communes or the creation of state-sponsored progressive rabbinical seminaries, then obviously they could not be trusted to simply do it on their own. On this point, Brafman differed little from his contemporaries. Many other articles carried in
Vilenskii Vestnik routinely castigated the Jews for their failures and internal abuses. In Brafman's 173rd article, he announced that he had made a discovery, which would become the basis of all his future writings. Prior to Brafman's article, Jewish intransigence had simply been viewed as the byproduct of religious fanaticism and a slavish devotion to the
Talmud. Brafman offered a more sophisticated view: the Jews, in the form of the
Qahal, had formed a hidden "state within a state". This kingdom, using the Talmud as its basis, allowed Rabbis to act as sovereigns over their fellow Jews and systematically exploit their non-Jewish neighbors. He argued that the mentality of the
qahal was the main barrier to
Jewish assimilation, as it deliberately made efforts to sustain Jewish separatism, and manipulated non-Jewish governments into aiding them in this task. Virtually every aspect of Jewish life was tied into this conspiratorial understanding of the
qahal.
Kosher slaughter, for example, was no longer a mere religious observance, but a method of reasserting the authority of the rabbi and collecting funds for the illicit deeds of the
qahal. Armed with this theory, Brafman began writing vehemently against the
qahal and Jewish organisations more generally. Brafman worked on studying Jewish community books of the qahal from Minsk from the years 1794 and 1833, with his own commentary added to try and prove his thesis; at the same time the
Rabbinical Seminary of Vilna was providing their own Russian translation. The combination of the poor translation and overt editing of Brafman led many to doubt the authenticity of these documents, but their authenticity received independent verification in 1875. Brafman published his findings as
The Book of the Kahal: Materials for the Study of the Jewish Life (1869). Copies of the book were then sent to many governmental offices throughout the Pale, in order to educate imperial officials about the realities of Jewish life. Brafman joined the
Imperial Russian Geographical Society in 1870. One of the main problems with Brafman's thesis was that the
qahal system itself in the
Russian Empire had been dissolved under Nicholas I in 1844. For Brafman he posited a
conspiracy theory that the
qahal in fact continued to exist as a
deep state, with reactionary rabbis working to keep control over the "average Jew" and to undermine Christian business interests at the same time, deliberately working to exclude them from all commercial competition. Brafman suggested that the
qahal was able to sustain its own secrecy by having each of its agents act as a spy for other agents of the
qahal. This way, if one of them was contemplating revealing the conspiracy, the
qahal could blackmail them with evidence of their own various criminal misdeeds. Non-Jews that were aware of the existence of the
qahal would simply be bribed into silence. The evidence of the
qahals existence, beyond the documents provided by Brafman, was in Jewish success. Jews, according to Brafman, continued to succeed, despite all of the legal restrictions placed upon them. This could not be the case, unless they had some secret or hidden advantage. Brafman's works chimed well with the
Slavophiles then active in Russia and the political theory of
Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality, which sought to distance Russian civilisation from French and British liberalism. Brafman's other major work,
The Local and Universal Jewish Brotherhoods (1868), took aim at international Jewish organisations, particularly those based in France. His main object for criticism was the
Alliance Israélite Universelle under prominent
freemason,
Adolphe Crémieux. For Brafman this was the
qahal of
qahals and as part of an
international Jewish conspiracy controlled the other
qahals. He saw this as the successor of the
Grand Sanhedrin (
Napoleon's Rabbinic Assembly of 1807). ==Influence==