A village Jew who happened to absent himself for a few days or weeks to go to town was frequently barred by the police from returning to his home, on the ground that he was "a new settler." There are cases of Jewish families on record which, according to custom, had left the village for the High Holidays to attend services in an adjacent town or townlet, and which, on their return home, met with considerable difficulties; because their return was interpreted by the police as a "new settlement." In the dominions of the anti-Jewish satrap Drenteln the administration construed the "Temporary Rules" to mean that Jews were not allowed to move from one village to another, or even from, one house to another within the precincts of their native village.

[2] [Footnote 1: See p.

318 et seq.] [Footnote 2: Evidence of this is found in the circular of the governor of Chernigov, issued In 1883.] Moreover, the police was authorized to expel from the villages all those Jews who did not possess their own houses upon their own land, on the ground that these Jews, in renting new quarters, would have to make a new lease with their owners, and such a lease was forbidden by the May laws.

[1] These malicious misinterpretations of the law affected some ten thousand Jews in the villages of Chernigov and Poltava.

These Jews lived habitually in rented houses or in houses which were their property but were built upon ground belonging to peasants, and they were consequently liable to expulsion.