Brafman Vs. The Qahal
Excerpt from Wikipedia’s Jacob Brafman entry. Main article: Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory

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”, and 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...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…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 qahal’s 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.