Jacob Brafman

The Book of the Kahal by Jacob Brafman, in the Russian language original. Iakov Aleksandrovich Brafman (; 1825 – 28 December 1879), commonly known as Jacob Brafman, was a Lithuanian Jew from near Minsk, who became notable for converting first to Lutheranism and then the Russian Orthodox Church. He advanced conspiracy theories against the Qahal and the Talmud. Brafman's works The Local and Universal Jewish Brotherhoods (1868) and The Book of the Kahal (1869) were foundational texts in establishing a theoretical basis for modern antisemitic thought in Russia and established a framework for themes later covered in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Background Brafman was born in 1825 and lived in Kletsk, a shtetl near Minsk in the Pale of Settlement. His father was a rabbi. Brafman grew up in poor conditions and was orphaned at a young age, being raised by distant relatives. Because of the poverty in which he was raised, Brafman was not given a substantial or traditional Jewish education. He frequently clashed with the traditional authorities of the shtetl, particularly members of the Chevra kadisha (Burial Society). In one particularly gruesome incident, after his young daughter had died, representatives of the Society demanded a sum beyond his ability to pay, before taking a pillow from the bed of his deceased child as collateral. To avoid military service as a cantonist, Brafman took to the road and failed at a number of professions, eventually fleeing to Minsk, where he tried to establish himself as a photographer.

Once in Minsk, Brafman converted to the Russian Orthodox Church in 1858, and became a missionary, successfully converting a portion of the city's Jews. (There is some evidence of an earlier conversion to Lutheranism, though this is disputed, and it is unclear how sincere such a conversion would have been, as Lutheranism had a notorious reputation as being the "religion of convenience" for insincere Jewish converts, owing to its decentralized character.) There was a state visit to Minsk in that year by Tsar Alexander II of Russia and Brafman submitted a memorandum on how Jews in Russia should best be proselytized into Orthodox Christianity and educated into "useful" subjects. The dichtomy of useful and useless Jews had been established by Tsar Nicholas I of Russia. Nicholas saw "use" in bourgeois Jews who were willing to assimilate into Russian society and could be used in academic and agricultural professions, while seeing as "useless" the poorer adherents of what would today be termed Orthodox Judaism who lived in the shtetls and kept themselves apart from wider society. Brafman proposed the creation of a new missionary society, which would perform all of its work in Yiddish. Further, Brafman offered to personally translate the entirety of the New Testament into Yiddish. Brafman's writing was sent to Saint Petersburg and subsequently earned him the chair of Hebrew Studies at the Minsk Theological Academy in 1860.

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. putting a conspiratorial spin on this theme as part of his rivalry with the Marxian socialists of the International Workingmen's Association.

Family One of Brafman's grandchildren was Vladislav Khodasevich, the Russian poet.

Cultural references Brafman is mentioned in The Prague Cemetery, the novel by Umberto Eco.

Works The Local and Universal Jewish Brotherhoods (1868) The Book of the Kahal: Materials for the Study of the Jewish Life (1869) The Book of the Kahal: An International Jewish Question (1879)