The Czarist regime forbade rabbinical courts from employing coercive measures and adopted policies to promote assimilation. This led to the censoring of Jewish texts, and a recent discovery has shown that this also affected the Alter Rebbe’s Shulchan Aruch.

Rabbinic Police Powers, Love and Hate, and Stern Censorship: Insights from Newly Discovered Passages of the Alter Rebbe’s Shulchan Aruch