[1] One passage especially makes the distinction clear;[1] part of the Priestly Code discusses what to do if "the whole Israelite [ʻēḏā] commits a sin and the [qahal] is not aware of it[.
]"[15] Scholars conclude that the qahal must be a judicial body composed of representatives of the ʿedah;[1] in some biblical passages, ʻēḏā is more accurately translated as "swarm".
[21] No explanation of the word mamzer is given in the Masoretic Text, but the Septuagint translates it as "son of a prostitute" (Ancient Greek: wikt:ἐκ πόρνης).
[29] Abraham Geiger, a prominent Jewish scholar and rabbi of the mid 19th century, suggested that the etymological origin of mamzer might be me'am zar, which means belonging to a foreign people.
[32] These Polish-Lithuanian kahals quickly came to be politically autonomous bodies with major regulatory control over Jewish communities in the region.
[32] The kahals acted as autonomous administration within each town, having jurisdiction over the local Jewish population and the legal right to regulate the contact between Poles and Jews in all their social, economical and political aspects.
tzedakah, mitzvot, halukkah), Jewish education, application of dietary laws (kashrut), and relations between landlords and their tenants.
[32] The researchers are still debating to what degree the official abolition of the kahal system (1822 in Congress Poland, and 1844 throughout the Russian Empire) was circumvented by the Jewish communities, who had internalised very deeply the spirit of local communal rule and gathered around legal associations such as the khevre kadisha (burial society).
This theory was taken up by anti-Jewish publications in Russia and by some Russian officials, such as P. A. Cherevin and Nikolay Pavlovich Ignatyev, who in the 1880s urged governor-generals of provinces to seek out a supposed "universal Jewish kahal.
"[citation needed] Brafmann's image of the qahal spread throughout the world, making its way to the United States by 1881, as it was translated by Zénaïde Alexeïevna Ragozin in The Century Magazine.