Jacob Brafman

Born to a rabbinical family in the shtetl of Kletsk (present-day Belarus), Jacob (Yakov, Yuri) Brafman converted to Russian Orthodoxy at age thirty-four, around which time he began to teach biblical Hebrew in Christian seminaries and work as a censor of Hebrew and Yiddish texts for the Imperial government in St. Petersburg. Brafman also published widely on Jewish subjects in Russian periodicals, claiming from his position as a converted Jew that he could provide evidence of an international Jewish conspiracy led by the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia and the Alliance Israélite Universelle. In 1869, Brafman published the first volume of his Kniga kagala (The Book of the Kahal), a work that combined records of the Jewish community in Minsk with falsified materials that allegedly proved the existence of a secret Jewish “state within a state” or “Talmudic Republic” in the tsarist empire. The work was later translated into European languages, serving as propaganda for antisemites for decades. Despite the efforts of Jewish writers and activists to disprove the book’s contents, it has had an unfortunate and enduring popularity in some circles.