CHAPTER V

THE AUTONOMOUS CENTER IN POLAND DURING ITS DECLINE (1648-1772)

1. ECONOMIC AND NATIONAL ANTAGONISM IN THE UKRAINA

The Jewish center in Poland, marked by compactness of numbers and a

widespread autonomous organization, seemed, down to the end of the

seventeenth century, to be the only secure nest of the Jewish people and

the legitimate seat of its national hegemony, which was slipping out of

the hands of German Jewry. But in 1648 this comparatively peaceful nest

was visited by a storm, which made the Jews of Eastern Europe speedily

realize that they would have to tread the same sorrowful path, strewn

with the bodies of martyrs, that had been traversed by their Western

European brethren in the Middle Ages. The factors underlying this crisis

were three: an acute economic class struggle, racial and religious

antagonism, and the appearance upon the horizon of Jewish history of a

new power of darkness--the semi-barbarous masses of Southern Russia.

In the central provinces of Poland the position of the Jews, as was

pointed out previously, was determined by the interaction of class and

economic forces on the one hand, and religious and political interests

on the other, changing in accordance with the different combinations of

the opposing factions. While the kings and the great nobles, prompted by

fiscal and agrarian considerations, in most cases encouraged the

commercial activities of the Jews, the urban estates, the trade and

merchant guilds, from motives of competition, tried to hinder them. As

for the Catholic clergy, it was on general principles ever on the alert

to oppress the "infidels."

As far as economic rivalry and social oppression are concerned, the Jews

were able to resist them, either by influencing the Polish governing

circles, or by combining their own forces and uniting them in a

firmly-organized scheme of self-government, which had been conceded to

them in so large a measure. At any rate, it was a cultural struggle

between two elements: the Polish and the Jewish population, the

Christian and the Jewish estates, or the Church and the Synagogue. This

struggle was vastly complicated in the southeastern border provinces of

Poland, the so-called Ukraina,[120] by the presence of a third element,

which was foreign to the Poles no less than to the Jews--the local

native population which was Russian by race and Greek Orthodox in

religion, and was engaged principally in agriculture.

The vast region around the southern basin of the Dnieper, the whole

territory comprising the provinces of Kiev, Poltava, and Chernigov, and

including parts of Podolia and Volhynia, was subject to the political

power of the Polish kings and the economic dominion of the Polish

magnates. Enormous estates, comprising a large number of villages

populated by Russian peasants, were here in the hands of wealthy Polish

landlords, who enjoyed all the rights of feudal owners. The enthralled

peasants, or khlops, as they were contemptuously nicknamed by the Polish

nobles, were strange to their masters in point of religion and

nationality. In the eyes of the Catholics, particularly in those of the

clergy, the Greek Orthodox faith was a "religion of khlops," and they

endeavored to eradicate it by forcing upon it compulsory church

unions[121] or by persecuting the "dissidents." The Poles looked upon

the Russian populace as an inferior race, which belonged more to Asia

than to Europe. In these circumstances, the economic struggle between

the feudal landlord and his serfs, unmitigated by the feeling of common

nationality and religion, was bound to assume acute forms. Apart from

the oppressive agricultural labor, which the peasants had to give

regularly and gratuitously to the landlord, they were burdened with a

multitude of minor imposts and taxes, levied on pastures, mills, hives,

etc. The Polish magnates lived, as a rule, far away from their Ukrainian

possessions, leaving the management of the latter in the hands of

stewards and arendars.

Among these rural arendars there were many Jews, who principally leased

from the pans the right of "propination," or the sale of spirituous

liquors. These leases had the effect of transferring to the Jews some of

the powers over the Russian serfs which were wielded by the noble

landowners. The Jewish arendar endeavored to derive as much profit from

the nobleman's estate as the owner himself would have derived had he

lived there. But under the prevailing conditions of serfdom these

profits could be extracted only by a relentless exploitation of the

peasants. Moreover, the contemptuous attitude of the Shlakhta and the

Catholic clergy towards the "religion of khlops," and their endeavors to

force the Greek Orthodox serfs into Catholicism, by imposing upon them

an ecclesiastic union, gave a sharp religious coloring to this economic

antagonism. The oppressed peasantry reacted to this treatment with

ominous murmurings and agrarian disturbances in several places. The

enslaved South Russian _muzhik_ hated the Polish pan in his capacity as

landlord, Catholic, and _Lakh_.[122] No less intensely did he hate the

Jewish arendar, with whom he came in daily contact, and whom he regarded

both as a steward of the pan and an "infidel," entirely foreign to him

on account of his religious customs and habits of life. Thus the

Ukrainian Jew found himself between hammer and anvil: between the pan

and the khlop, between the Catholic and the Greek Orthodox, between the

Pole and the Russian. Three classes, three religions, and three

nationalities, clashed on a soil which contained in its bowels terrible

volcanic forces--and a catastrophe was bound to follow.

The South Russian population, though politically and agriculturally

dependent upon the Poles, was far from being that patient "beast of

burden" into which the rule of serfdom tried to transform it. Many

circumstances combined to foster a warlike spirit in this population.

The proximity of the New Russian steppes and the Khanate of the Crimea,

whence hordes of Tatars often burst forth to swoop down like birds of

prey upon the eastern provinces of Poland, compelled the inhabitants of

the Ukraina to organize themselves into warlike companies, or

Cossacks,[123] to fight off the invaders. The Polish Government, acting

through its local governors or starostas, encouraged the formation of

these companies for the defense of the borders of the Empire. In this

way Ukrainian Cossackdom, a semi-military, semi-agricultural caste, came

into being, with an autonomous organization and its own _hetman_[124] at

the head.

Apart from the Ukrainian Cossacks, who were subject to the Polish

Government, there were also the so-called Zaporozhian[125] Cossacks, a

completely independent military organization which lived beyond the

Falls of the Dnieper, in the steppes of so-called New Russia, the

present Governments of Yekaterinoslav and Kherson, and indulged in

frequent raids upon the Turks and in constant warfare with the Tatars of

the Crimea. This military camp, or _syech_,[126] beyond the Falls of the

Dnieper attracted many khlops from the Ukraina, who preferred a free,

unrestricted military life to the dreary existence of laboring slaves.

The syech represented a primitive military republic, where daring,

pluck, and knightly exploits were valued above all. It was a

semi-barbarous Tatar horde, except that it professed the Greek Orthodox

faith, and was of Russian origin, though, by the way, with a

considerable admixture of Mongolian blood. The Ukrainian and Zaporozhian

Cossacks were in constant relations with each other. The peasants of the

Ukraina looked up with pride and hope to this their national guard,

which sooner or later was bound to free them from the rule of the Poles

and Jews. The Polish Government failed to perceive that on the eastern

borders of the Empire a mass of explosives was constantly accumulating,

which threatened to wreck the whole Polish Republic.

Nor could the Jews foresee that this terrible force would be directed

against them, and would stain with blood many pages of their history,

serving as a terrible omen for the future. The first warning was sounded

in 1637, when the Cossack leader Pavluk suddenly appeared from beyond

the Falls in the province of Poltava, inciting the peasants to rise

against the pans and the Jews. The rebels demolished several synagogues

in the town of Lubny and in neighboring places, and killed about two

hundred Jews. The real catastrophe, however, came ten years later. The

mutiny of the Cossacks and the Ukrainian peasants in 1648 inaugurates in

the history of the Jews of Eastern Europe the era of pogroms, which

Southern Russia bequeathed to future generations down to the beginning

of the twentieth century.

2. THE POGROMS AND MASSACRES OF 1648-1649

In the spring of 1648, while King Vladislav IV. still sat on the throne

of Poland, one of the popular Cossack leaders, Bogdan Khmelnitzki, from

the town of Chigirin, in the province of Kiev, unfurled the banner of

rebellion in the Ukraina and in the region beyond the Dnieper Falls.

Infuriated by the conduct of the Polish authorities of his native

place,[127] Khmelnitzki began to incite the Ukrainian Cossacks to armed

resistance. They elected him secretly their hetman, and empowered him to

conduct negotiations with the Zaporozhians. Having arrived in the region

beyond the Dnieper Falls, he organized military companies, and concluded

an alliance with the Khan of the Crimea, who entered into a compact to

send large troops of Tatars to the aid of the rebels.

In April, 1648, the combined hosts of the Cossacks and Tatars moved from

beyond the Falls of the Dnieper to the borders of the Ukraina. In the

neighborhood of the Yellow Waters and Korsun they inflicted a severe

defeat on the Polish army under the command of Pototzki and Kalinovski

(May 6-15), and this defeat served as a signal for the whole region on

the eastern banks of the Dnieper to rise in rebellion. The Russian

peasants and town dwellers left their homes, and, organizing themselves

into bands, devastated the estates of the pans, slaying their owners as

well as the stewards and Jewish arendars. In the towns of Pereyaslav,

Piryatin, Lokhvitz, Lubny, and the surrounding country, thousands of

Jews were barbarously killed, and their property was either destroyed or

pillaged. The rebels allowed only those to survive who embraced the

Greek Orthodox faith. The Jews of several cities of the Kiev region, in

order to escape from the hands of the Cossacks, fled into the camp of

the Tatars, and gave themselves up voluntarily as prisoners of war. They

knew that the Tatars refrained as a rule from killing them, and

transported them instead into Turkey, where they were sold as slaves,

and had a chance of being ransomed by their Turkish coreligionists.

At that juncture, in the month of May, King Vladislav IV. died, and an

interregnum ensued, which, marked by political unrest, lasted six

months. The flame of rebellion seized the whole of the Ukraina, as well

as Volhynia and Podolia. Bands composed of Cossacks and Russian peasants

led by Khmelnitzki's accomplices, savage Zaporozhian Cossacks, dispersed

in all directions, and began to exterminate Poles and Jews. To quote a

Russian historian:

Killing was accompanied by barbarous tortures; the victims were

flayed alive, split asunder, clubbed to death, roasted on coals,

or scalded with boiling water. Even infants at the breast were

not spared. The most terrible cruelty, however, was shown

towards the Jews. They were destined to utter annihilation, and

the slightest pity shown to them was looked upon as treason.

Scrolls of the Law were taken out of the synagogues by the

Cossacks, who danced on them while drinking whiskey. After this

Jews were laid down upon them, and butchered without mercy.

Thousands of Jewish infants were thrown into wells, or buried

alive.

Contemporary Jewish chroniclers add that these human beasts purposely

refrained from finishing their victims, so as to be able to torture them

longer. They cut off their hands and feet, split the children asunder,

"fish-like," or roasted them on fire. They opened the bowels of women,

inserted live cats, and then sewed up the wounds. The unbridled

bestiality of intoxicated savages found expression in these frightful

tortures, of which even the Tatars were incapable.

Particularly tragic was the fate of those Jews who, in the hope of

greater safety, had fled from the villages and townlets to the fortified

cities. Having learned that several thousand Jews had taken refuge in

the town of Niemirov in Podolia, Khmelnitzki dispatched thither a

detachment of Cossacks under the command of the Zaporozhian Gania.

Finding it difficult to take the city by storm, the Cossacks resorted to

a trick. They drew nigh to Niemirov, carrying aloft the Polish banners

and requesting admission into the city. The Jews, fooled into believing

that it was a Polish army that had come to their rescue, opened the

gates (Sivan 20 = June 10, 1648). The Cossacks, in conjunction with the

local Russian inhabitants, fell upon the Jews and massacred them; the

women and girls were violated. The Rabbi and Rosh-Yeshibah of Niemirov,

Jehiel Michael ben Eliezer, hid himself in the cemetery with his mother,

hoping in this wise at least to be buried after death. There he was

seized by one of the rioters, a shoemaker, who began to club him. His

aged mother begged the murderer to kill her instead of her son, but the

inhuman shoemaker killed first the rabbi and then the aged woman.

The young Jewish women were frequently allowed to live, the Cossacks and

peasants forcing them into baptism and taking them for wives. One

beautiful Jewish girl who had been kidnaped for this purpose by a

Cossack managed to convince him that she was able to throw a spell over

bullets. She asked him to shoot at her, so as to prove to him that the

bullet would glide off without causing her any injury. The Cossack

discharged his gun, and the girl fell down, mortally wounded, yet happy

in the knowledge that she was saved from a worse fate. Another Jewish

girl, whom a Cossack was on the point of marrying, threw herself from

the bridge into the water, while the wedding procession was marching to

the church. Altogether about six thousand Jews perished in the city of

Niemirov.

Those who escaped death fled to the fortified Podolian town of Tulchyn.

Here an even more terrible tragedy was enacted. A large horde of

Cossacks and peasants laid siege to the fortress, which contained

several hundred Poles and some fifteen hundred Jews. The Poles and Jews

took an oath not to betray one another and to defend the city to their

last breath. The Jews, stationed on the walls of the fortress, shot at

the besiegers, keeping them off from the city. After a long and

unsuccessful siege the Cossacks conceived a treacherous plan. They

informed the Poles of Tulchyn that they were aiming solely at the Jews,

and, as soon as the latter were delivered into their hands, they would

leave the Poles in peace. The Polish pans, headed by Count

Chetvertinski, forgot their oath, and decided to sacrifice their Jewish

allies to secure their own safety. When the Jews discovered this

treacherous intention, they immediately resolved to dispose of the

Poles, whom they excelled in numbers. But the Rosh-Yeshibah of Tulchyn,

Rabbi Aaron, implored them not to touch the pans, on the ground that

such action might draw upon the Jews all over the Empire the hatred of

the Polish population. "Let us rather perish," he exclaimed, "as did our

brethren in Niemirov, and let us not endanger the lives of our brethren

in all the places of their dispersion." The Jews yielded. They turned

over all their property to Chetvertinski, asking him to offer it to the

Cossacks as a ransom for their lives.

After entering the city, the Cossacks first took possession of the

property of the Jews, and then drove them together into a garden, where

they put up a banner and declared, "Let those who are willing to accept

baptism station themselves under this banner, and we will spare their

lives." The rabbis exhorted the people to accept martyrdom for the sake

of their religion and their people. Not a single Jew was willing to

become a traitor, and fifteen hundred victims were murdered in a most

barbarous fashion. Nor did the perfidious Poles escape their fate.

Another detachment of Cossacks, which entered Tulchyn later, slew all

the Catholics, among them Count Chetvertinski. Treachery avenged

treachery.

From Podolia the rebel bands penetrated into Volhynia. Here the

massacres continued in the course of the whole summer and autumn of

1648. In the town of Polonnoye ten thousand Jews met their death at the

hands of the Cossacks, or were taken captive by the Tatars. Among the

victims was the Cabalist Samson of Ostropol, who was greatly revered by

the people. This Cabalist, and three hundred pious fellow-Jews who

followed him, put on their funeral garments, the shrouds and prayer

shawls, and offered up fervent prayers in the synagogue, awaiting death

in the sacred place, where the murderers subsequently killed them one by

one. Similar massacres took place in Zaslav, Ostrog, Constantinov,

Narol, Kremenetz, Bar, and many other cities. The Ukraina as well as

Volhynia and Podolia were turned into one big slaughter-house.

The Polish troops, particularly those under the brave command of Count

Jeremiah Vishniovetzki, succeeded in subduing the Cossacks and peasants

in several places, annihilating some of their bands with the same

cruelty that the Cossacks had displayed towards the Poles and the Jews.

The Jews fled to these troops for their safety, and they were welcomed

by Vishniovetzki, who admitted the unfortunates into the baggage train,

and, to use the expression of a Jewish chronicler, took care of them "as

a father of his children." After the catastrophe of Niemirov he entered

the city with his army, and executed the local rioters who had

participated in the murder of the Jewish inhabitants. However, standing

all alone, he was unable to extinguish the flame of the Cossack

rebellion. For the commanders-in-chief of the Polish army did not

display the proper energy at this critical moment, and Khmelnitzki was

right in dubbing them contemptuously "featherbeds," "youngsters," and

"Latins" ("bookworms").

From the Ukraina bands of rebellious peasants, or _haidamacks_,

penetrated into the nearest towns of White Russia and Lithuania. From

Chernigov and Starodub, where the Jewish inhabitants had been

exterminated, the murderers moved towards the city of Homel (July or

August). A contemporary gives the following description of the Homel

massacre:

The rebels managed to bribe the head of the city, who delivered

the Jews into their hands. The Greeks [_Yevanim, i. e._ the

Greek Orthodox Russians] surrounded them with drawn swords, and

with daggers and spears, exclaiming: "Why do you believe in your

God, who has no pity on His suffering people, and does not save

it from our hands? Reject your God, and you shall be masters!

But if you will cling to the faith of your fathers, you shall

all perish in the same way as your brethren in the Ukraina, in

Pokutye,[128] and Lithuania perished at our hands." Thereupon

Rabbi Eliezer, our teacher, the president of the [rabbinical]

court, exclaimed: "Brethren, remember the death of our

fellow-Jews, who perished to sanctify the name of our God! Let

us too stretch forth our necks to the sword of the enemy; look

at me and act as I do!" Immediately thousands of Jews renounced

their lives, despised this world, and hallowed the name of God.

The Rosh-Yeshibah was the first to offer up his body as a

burnt-offering. Young and old, boys and girls saw the tortures,

sufferings, and wounds of the teacher, who did not cease

exhorting them to accept martyrdom in the name of Him who had

called into being the generations of mortals. As one man they

all exclaimed: "Let us forgive one another our mutual insults.

Let us offer up our souls to God and our bodies to the wild

waves, to our enemies, the offspring of the Greeks!" When our

enemies heard these words, they started a terrible butchery,

killing their victims with spears in order that they might die

slowly. Husbands, wives, and children fell in heaps. They did

not even attain to burial, dogs and swine feeding on their dead

bodies.

In September, 1648, Khmelnitzki himself, marching at the head of a

Cossack army, and accompanied by his Tatar allies, approached the walls

of Lemberg, and began to besiege the capital of Red Russia, or Galicia.

The Cossacks succeeded in storming and pillaging the suburbs, but they

failed to penetrate to the fortified center of the town. Khmelnitzki

proposed to the magistracy of Lemberg, that it deliver all the Jews and

their property into the hands of the Cossacks, promising in this case to

raise the siege. The magistracy replied that the Jews were under the

jurisdiction of the king, and the town authorities had no right to

dispose of them. Khmelnitzki thereupon agreed to withdraw, having

obtained from the city an enormous ransom, the bulk of which had been

contributed by the Jews.

From Lemberg Khmelnitzki proceeded with his troops in the direction of

Warsaw, where at that time the election of a new king was taking place.

The choice fell upon John Casimir, a brother of Vladislav IV., who had

been Primate of Gnesen and a Cardinal (1648-1668). The new King entered

into peace negotiations with the leader of the rebels, the hetman

Khmelnitzki. But owing to the excessive demands of the Cossacks the

negotiations were broken off, and as a result, in the spring of 1649,

the flame of civil war flared up anew, accompanied by the destruction of

many more Jewish communities. After a succession of battles in which the

Poles were defeated, a treaty of peace was concluded between John

Casimir and Khmelnitzki, in the town of Zborov. In this treaty, which

was favorable to the Cossacks, a clause was included forbidding the

residence of Jews in the portion of the Ukraina inhabited by the

Cossacks, the regions of Chernigov, Poltava, Kiev, and partly Podolia

(August, 1649).

At last the Jews, after a year and a half of suffering and tortures,

could heave a sigh of relief. Those of them who, at the point of death,

had embraced the Greek Orthodox faith, were permitted by King John

Casimir to return to their old creed. The Jewish women who had been

forcibly baptized fled in large numbers from their Cossack husbands, and

returned to their families. The Council of the Four Lands, which met in

Lublin in the winter of 1650, framed a set of regulations looking to the

restoration of normal conditions in the domestic and communal life of

the Jews. The day of the Niemirov massacre (Sivan 20), which coincided

with an old fast day in memory of the martyrs of the Crusades, was

appointed a day of mourning, to commemorate the victims of the Cossack

rebellion. Leading rabbis of the time composed a number of soul-stirring

dirges and prayers, which were recited in the synagogues on the fateful

anniversary of the twentieth of Sivan.

But the respite granted to the Jews after these terrible events did not

last long. The Treaty of Zborov, which was unsatisfactory to the Polish

Government, was not adhered to by it. Mutual resentment gave rise to new

collisions, and civil war broke out again, in 1651. The Polish

Government called together the national militia, which included a Jewish

detachment of one thousand men. This time the people's army got the

upper hand against the troops of Khmelnitzki, with the result that a

treaty of peace was concluded which was advantageous to the Poles. In

the Treaty of Byelaya Tzerkov, concluded in September, 1651, many claims

of the Cossacks were rejected, and the right of the Jews to live in the

Greek Orthodox portion of the Ukraina was restored.[129]

As a result, the Cossacks and Greek Orthodox Ukrainians rose again.

Bogdan Khmelnitzki entered into negotiations with the Russian Tzar

Alexis Michaelovich, looking to the incorporation, with the rights of an

autonomous province, of the Greek Orthodox portion of the Ukraina, under

the name of Little Russia, into the Muscovite Empire. In 1654 this

incorporation took place, and in the same year the Russian army marched

upon White Russia and Lithuania to wage war on Poland. Now came the turn

of the Jews of the northwestern region to endure their share of

suffering.

3. THE RUSSIAN AND SWEDISH INVASIONS (1654-1658)

The alliance of their enemies, the Cossacks, with the rulers of Muscovy,

a country which had always felt a superstitious dread of the people of

other lands and religions, was fraught with untold misery for the Jews.

It was now the turn of the inhabitants of White Russia and Lithuania to

face the hordes of southern and northern Scythians, who invaded the

regions hitherto spared by them, devastating them uninterruptedly for

two years (1654-1656). The capture of the principal Polish cities by the

combined hosts of the Muscovites and Cossacks was accompanied by the

extermination or expulsion of the Jews. When Moghilev on the

Dnieper[130] surrendered to Russian arms, Tzar Alexis Michaelovich

complied with the request of the local Russian inhabitants, and gave

orders to expel the Jews and divide their houses between the magistracy

and the Russian authorities (1654). The Jews, however, who were hoping

for a speedy termination of hostilities, failed to leave the city at

once, and had to pay severely for it. Towards the end of the summer of

1655 the commander of the Russian garrison in Moghilev, Colonel

Poklonski, learned of the approach of a Polish army under the command of

Radziwill. Prompted by the fear that the Jewish residents might join the

approaching enemy, Poklonski ordered the Jews to leave the boundaries of

the city, and, on the ground of their being Polish subjects, promised to

have them transferred to the camp of Radziwill. Scarcely had the Jews,

accompanied by their wives and children, and carrying with them their

property, left the town behind them when the Russian soldiers, at the

command of the same Poklonski, fell upon them and killed nearly all of

them, plundering their property at the same time.

In Vitebsk the Jews took an active part in defending the town against

the besieging Russian army. They dug trenches around the fortified

castle, strengthened the walls, supplied the soldiers with arms, powder,

and horses, and acted as scouts. When the city was finally taken by the

Russians, the Jews were completely robbed by the Zaporozhian Cossacks,

while many of them were taken captive, forcibly baptized, or exiled to

Pskov, Novgorod, and Kazan.

The Jews suffered no less heavily from the riot which took place in

Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, after its occupation by the combined

army of Muscovites and Cossacks in August, 1655. A large part of the

Vilna community fled for its life. Those who remained behind were either

killed or banished from the town at the command of Tzar Alexis

Michaelovich, who was anxious to comply with the request of the local

Russian townspeople, to rid them of their Jewish competitors.

Shortly thereafter a similar fate overtook the central Polish provinces

on the Vistula and the San River, which had hitherto been spared the

horrors of the Cossacks and Muscovites. The invasion of Sweden, the

third enemy of Poland (1655-1658), carried bloodshed into the very heart

of the country. The Swedish King, Charles Gustav, reduced one city after

the other, both the old and the new capital, Cracow and Warsaw, speedily

surrendering to him. A large part of Great and Little Poland fell into

the hands of the Swedes, and the Polish King, John Casimir, was

compelled to flee to Silesia.

The easy victories of the Swedes were the result of the anarchy and

political demoralization which had taken deep root in Poland. It was the

treachery of the former Polish sub-Chancellor Radzieyevski that brought

the Swedes into Poland, and the cowardice of the Shlakhta hastily

surrendered the cities of Posen, Kalish, Cracow, and Vilna, to the

enemy. Moreover the Swedes were welcomed by the Polish Protestants and

Calvinists, who looked for their rescue to the northern Protestant power

in the same way in which the Cossacks expected their salvation from

Orthodox Russia.

The Jews were the only ones who had no political advantage in betraying

their country, and their friendly attitude towards the Swedes no more

than corresponded to the conduct of the Swedes towards them. At any

rate, their patriotism was no more open to suspicion than that of the

Poles themselves, who joined the power of Sweden to get rid of the yoke

of Muscovy. Nevertheless, the Jews had to pay a terrible price for this

lack of patriotism. They found themselves, in the words of a

contemporary chronicler, in the position of a man who "fleeth from a

lion, and is met by a bear."[131] The Jews who had been spared by the

Swedes were now annihilated by the patriotic Poles, who charged them

with disloyalty. The bands of Polish irregulars, which had been

organized in 1656, under the command of General Charnetzki, to save the

country from the invader, vented their fury upon the Jews in all the

localities which they wrested from the Swedes.

The massacre of Jews began in Great and Little Poland, without yielding

in point of barbarism to the butcheries which, eight years previously,

had been perpetrated in the Ukraina. The Polish hosts of Charnetzki had

learned from the Cossacks the art of exterminating the Jews. Nearly all

the Jewish communities in the province of Posen, excepting the city of

Posen, and those in the provinces of Kalish, Cracow, and Piotrkov, were

destroyed by the saviors of the Polish fatherland. The brutal and wicked

Charnetzki, to use the epithets applied to him by the Jewish annalists,

or, to be more exact, the Polish mob marching behind him, committed

atrocities which were truly worthy of the Cossacks. They tortured and

murdered the rabbis, violated the women, killed the Jews by the

hundreds, sparing only those who were willing to become Catholics. These

atrocities were as a rule committed in the wake of the retreating

Swedes, who had behaved like human beings towards the Jewish population.

The humaneness shown by the Swedes to the Jews was avenged by the

inhumanity of the Poles.

While the bands of Charnetzki were attacking the Jews in Western Poland,

the Muscovites and Cossacks continued to disport themselves in the

eastern districts and in Lithuania. Not until 1658 did the horrors of

warfare begin gradually to subside, and only after terrible losses and

humiliating concessions to Russia and Sweden was Poland able to restore

its political order, which had been shaken to its foundation during the

preceding years.

The losses inflicted upon the Jews of Poland during the fatal decade of

1648-1658 were appalling. In the reports of the chroniclers the number

of Jewish victims varies between one hundred thousand and five hundred

thousand. But even if we accept the lower figure, the number of victims

still remains colossal, excelling the catastrophes of the Crusades and

the Black Death in Western Europe. Some seven hundred Jewish communities

in Poland had suffered massacre and pillage. In the Ukrainian cities

situated on the left banks of the Dnieper, the region populated by

Cossacks, in the present Governments of Chernigov, Poltava, and part of

Kiev, the Jewish communities had disappeared almost completely. In the

localities on the right shore of the Dnieper or in the Polish part of

the Ukraina as well as in those of Volhynia and Podolia, wherever the

Cossacks had made their appearance, only about one-tenth of the Jewish

population survived. The others had either perished during the rebellion

of Khmelnitzki, or had been carried off by the Tatars into Turkey, or

had emigrated to Lithuania, the central provinces of Poland, or the

countries of Western Europe. All over Europe and Asia Jewish refugees or

prisoners of war could be met with, who had fled from Poland, or had

been carried off by the Tatars, and ransomed by their brethren.

Everywhere the wanderers told a terrible tale of the woes of their

compatriots and of the martyrdom of hundreds of Jewish communities.

An echo of all these horrors resounds in contemporary chronicles and

mournful synagogue liturgies. One of the eye-witnesses of the Ukraina

massacres, Nathan Hannover, from Zaslav, gives a striking description of

it in his historical chronicle _Yeven Metzula_[132] (1653). Sabbatai

Kohen, the famous scholar of Vilna,[133] brought this catastrophe to the

notice of the Jewish world through a circular letter, entitled

_Meghillath Efa_,[134] which was accompanied by prayers in memory of the

Polish martyrs. In heartrending liturgies many contemporary rabbis and

writers, such as Lipman Heller, Rabbi of Cracow, Sheftel Horovitz, Rabbi

of Posen, the scholars Meïr of Shchebreshin[135] (_Tzok ha-`Ittim_,[136]

1650) and Gabriel Shussberg (_Petah Teshuba_,[137] 1653), lament the

destruction of Polish Jewry. All these writings are pervaded with the

bitter consciousness that Polish Jewry would never recuperate from the

blows it had received, and that the peaceful nest in which the

persecuted nation had found a refuge was destroyed forever.

4. THE RESTORATION (1658-1697)

Fortunately these apprehensions proved to be exaggerated. Though

decimated and impoverished, the Jewish population of Poland exceeded in

numbers the Jewish settlements of Western Europe. The chief center of

Judaism remained in Poland as theretofore, though it became the center

of a more circumscribed and secluded section of Jewry. The extraordinary

vitality of the "eternal people" was again demonstrated by the fact that

the Polish Jews were able, in a comparatively short time, to recover

from their terrible losses. No sooner had peace been restored in Poland

than they began to return to their demolished nests and to re-establish

their economic position and communal self-government, which had been so

violently shaken. King John Casimir, having resumed the reins of

government, declared that it was his inmost desire to compensate his

Jewish subjects, though it be only in part, for the sufferings inflicted

upon them and to assist them in recuperating from material ruin. This

declaration the King made in the form of a charter bestowing the right

of free commerce upon the Jews of Cracow (1661). Various privileges, as

well as temporary alleviations in the payment of taxes, were conferred

by him upon numerous other Jewish communities which had suffered most

from the horrors of the Cossacks and the invasions of the Russians and

Swedes.

It goes without saying that all this could only soften the consequences

of the terrible economic crisis, but could not avert them. The crisis

left its sad impress particularly upon the South, which had been the

scene of the Cossack rebellion. As far as the Ukraina was concerned,

peace was not completely restored for a long time. By the Treaty of

Andrusovo, of 1667, Poland and Muscovy divided the province between

them: the portion situated on the right bank of the Dnieper (Volhynia

and Podolia) remained with Poland, while the section on the left bank of

the same river, called Little Russia (the region of Poltava, Chernigov,

and part of the district of Kiev, including the city of the same name),

was ceded to Muscovy. However, in consequence of the party dissensions

which divided the ranks of the Cossacks, and made their various hetmans

gravitate now towards the one, now towards the other, of the sovereign

powers, the Ukraina continued for a long time to be an apple of discord

between Poland, Russia, and Turkey. This agitation handicapped alike the

agricultural pursuits of the peasants and the commercial activities of

the Jews. In Little Russia the Jews had almost disappeared, while in the

Polish Ukraina they had become greatly impoverished. The southwestern

region, where the Jews had once upon a time lived so comfortably, sank

economically lower and lower, and gradually yielded its supremacy to the

northwest, to Lithuania and White Russia, which had suffered

comparatively little during the years of unrest. The transfer of the

cultural center of Judaism from the south to the north forms one of the

characteristic features of the period.

Michael Vishniovetzki (1669-1673), who was elected King after John

Casimir, extended his protection to the Jews by virtue of family

traditions, being a son of the hero Jeremiah Vishniovetzki, who had

saved many a Jewish community of the Ukraina during the sinister years

of the Cossack mutiny. At the Coronation Diet[138] Vishniovetzki

ratified the fundamental privileges of the Polish and Lithuanian Jews,

"as far as these privileges are not in contradiction with the general

laws and customs." This ratification had been obtained through an

application of the "general syndic of the Jews," Moses Markovich,[139]

who evidently acted as the spokesman of all the Kahals of the ancient

provinces of Poland. The benevolent intentions of the King were

counteracted by the Diets, which, controlled by the clergy and Shlakhta,

issued restrictive laws against the Jews. The Diet of Warsaw held in

1670 not only limited the financial operations of Jewish capitalists by

fixing a maximum rate of interest (20%)[140]--this would have been

perfectly legitimate--but also thought it necessary to restore the old

canonical regulations forbidding the Jews to keep Christian domestics or

to leave their houses during the Church processions. In these Diet

regulations, particularly in their tone and motivation ("in order that

the perfidy and self-will of the Jews should not gain the upper hand,"

etc.), one cannot fail to perceive the venom of the Catholic clergy,

which once more engaged in its old _métier_ of slandering the Jews,

charging them with hostility to the Christians and with the desecration

of Church sacraments.

The influence of these Church fanatics upon the Polish schools, coupled

with the general deterioration of morals as a result of the protracted

wars, was responsible for the recrudescence, during that period, of the

ugly street attacks upon the Jews by the students of the Christian

colleges, the so-called _Schülergeläuf_. These scholastic excesses now

became an everyday occurrence in the cities of Poland. The riotous

scholars not only caused public scandals by insulting Jewish passers-by

on the street, but frequently invaded the Jewish quarters, where they

instituted regular pogroms. Most of these disorders were engineered by

the pupils of the Academy of Cracow and the Jesuit schools in Posen,

Lemberg, Vilna, and Brest.

The local authorities were passive onlookers of these savage pranks of

the future citizens of Poland, which occasionally assumed very dangerous

forms. In order to protect themselves from such attacks many Jewish

communities paid an annual tax to the rectors of the local Catholic

schools, and this tax, which was called _kozubales_, was officially

recognized by the "common law" then in use. However, even the ransom

agreed upon could not save the Jews of Lemberg from a bloody pogrom. The

pupils of the Cathedral school and the Jesuit Academy of that city were

preparing to storm the Jewish quarter. Having learned of the intentions

of the rioters, the Jewish youth of Lemberg organized an armed

self-defense, and courageously awaited the enemy. But the attack of the

Christian students, who were assisted by the mob, was so furious that

the Jewish guard was unable to hold its own. The resistance of the Jews

only resulted in exasperating the rioters, and the disorders took the

form of a massacre. About a hundred Jewish dead, a large number of

demolished houses, several desecrated synagogues, were the result of the

barbarous amusement of the disciples of the militant Church (1664).

Of the medieval trials of that period two cases, one in Lithuania and

the other in the Crown, stand out with particular prominence. The former

took place in the little town of Ruzhany, in the province of Grodno, in

1657. The local Christians, who on their Easter festival had placed a

dead child's body in the yard of a Jew, thereupon charged the whole

community with having committed a ritual murder. The trial lasted nearly

three years, and ended in the execution of two representatives of the

Jewish community, Rabbi Israel and Rabbi Tobias. A dirge commemorating

this event, composed by a son of one of the martyrs, contains a

heartrending description of the tragedy.[141]

My enemies have arisen against me, and have spread their nets in

the shape of a false accusation in order to destroy my

possessions. They took dead bodies, slashed them, and spoke with

furious cunning: Behold, the ill-fated Jews drink and suck the

blood of the murdered, and feed on the children of the Gentiles.

Three years did the horrible slander last, and we thought our

liberation was near, but, alas, terrible darkness has engulfed

us. Our sworn enemies dragged us before their hostile court. The

evil-doers assembled in the week before the New Year, and turned

justice into wormwood. A wily and wicked Gentile judged only by

the sight of his eyes, without witnesses; he judged innocent and

sinless people in order to shed pure blood. The horde of

evil-doers pronounced a perverted verdict, saying: "Choose ye

[for execution] two Jews, such as may please you." A beautiful

pair fell into their nets: Rabbi Israel and Rabbi Tobias, the

holy ones, were singled out from among the community.[142] These

men saw the glittering blade of the sword, but no fear fell upon

them. They clasped each other's hands and swore to share the

same fate. "Let us take courage, and let us prepare with a light

heart to sacrifice ourselves. Let us become the lambs for the

slaughter; we shall surely find protection under the wings of

God." On the sixth day these holy men were led out to execution,

and an altar was erected. The wrath of the Lord burst forth in

the year of "Recompense,"[143] on the festival of Commemoration

[New Year]. The bitterness of death was awaiting [the martyrs]

in the midst of the market-place. They confessed their sins,

saying: "We have sinned before the Lord. Let us sanctify His

name like Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah." They turned to the

executioner, saying: "Grant us one hour of respite, that we may

render praise unto the Lord." The lips of the impure, the false

lips of those who pursue the wind and worship corrupt images,

came to tempt them with strange beliefs,[144] but the holy men

exclaimed: "Away, ye impure! Shall we renounce the living God,

and wander after trees?"[145] The holy Rabbi Israel stretched

forth his neck, and shouted with all his might: "Hear, O Israel,

the Lord our God, the Lord is one." Thereupon the executioner

stretched forth his hand to take the sword, and the costly

vessel was shattered. When the holy Rabbi Tobias saw this loss,

he exclaimed: "Blessed art thou, O Rabbi Israel, who hast passed

first into the Realm of Light. I follow thee." He too exclaimed:

"Hear, O Israel, who art guarded [by God] like the apple of the

eye." And he went forth to die in the name of the Lord, and [the

executioner] slew him as he had slain the first.

Another tragedy took place in Cracow, in 1663. The educated Jewish

apothecary Mattathiah Calahora, a native of Italy who had settled in

Cracow, committed the blunder of arguing with a local priest, a member

of the Dominican order, about religious topics. The priest invited

Calahora to a disputation in the cloister, but the Jew declined,

promising to expound his views in writing. A few days later the priest

found on his chair in the church a statement written in German and

containing a violent arraignment of the cult of the Immaculate Virgin.

It is not impossible that the statement was composed and placed in the

church by an adherent of the Reformation or the Arian heresy,[146] both

of which were then the object of persecution in Poland. However, the

Dominican decided that Calahora was the author, and brought the charge

of blasphemy against him.

The Court of the Royal Castle cross-examined the defendant under

torture, without being able to obtain a confession. Witnesses testified

that Calahora was not even able to write German. Being a native of

Italy, he used the Italian language in his conversations with the

Dominican. In spite of all this evidence, the unfortunate Calahora was

sentenced to be burned at the stake. The alarmed Jewish community raised

a protest, and the case was accordingly transferred to the highest court

in Piotrkov.[147] The accused was sent in chains to Piotrkov, together

with the plaintiff and the witnesses. But the arch-Catholic tribunal

confirmed the verdict of the lower court, ordering that the sentence be

executed in the following barbarous sequence: first the lips of the

"blasphemer" to be cut off; next his hand that had held the fateful

statement to be burned; then the tongue, which had spoken against the

Christian religion, to be excised; finally the body to be burned at the

stake, and the ashes of the victim to be loaded into a cannon and

discharged into the air. This cannibal ceremonial was faithfully carried

out on December 13, 1663, on the market-place of Piotrkov. For two

centuries the Jews of Cracow followed the custom of reciting, on the

fourteenth of Kislev, in the old synagogue of that city, a memorial

prayer for the soul of the martyr Calahora.

There is evidently some connection between this event and the epistle

sent by the General of the Dominican Order in Rome, Marini, to the head

of the order in Cracow, dated February 9, 1664. Marini states that the

"unfortunate Jews" of Poland had complained to him about the "wicked

slanders" and accusations, the "sole purpose" of which was to influence

the Diet soon to assemble at Warsaw, and demonstrate to it that "the

Polish people hate the Jews unconditionally." He requests his colleagues

in Cracow and the latter's subordinates "to defend the hapless people

against every calumny invented against them." Subsequent history shows

that the epistle was sent in vain.

The last Polish king who extended efficient protection to the Jews

against the classes and parties hostile to them, was John III. Sobieski

(1674-1696), who by his military exploits succeeded in restoring the

political prestige of Poland. This King had frequent occasion to fight

the growing anti-Semitic tendencies of the Shlakhta, the municipalities,

and the clergy. He granted safe-conducts to various Jewish communities,

protecting their "liberties and privileges," enlarged their sphere of

self-government, and freed them from the jurisdiction of the local

municipal authorities. In 1682 he complied with the request of the Jews

of Vilna, who begged to be released from the municipal census. The

application was prompted by the fact that a year previously they had

been induced by the magistracy of Vilna, which assured them of complete

safety, to go outside the town where the census of the Jews and the

Christian trade-unions was taken. But no sooner had the Jews left the

confines of the city than the members of the trade-unions and other

Christian inhabitants of Vilna began to shoot at them and rob them of

their clothes and valuables. The Jews would have been entirely

annihilated, had not the pupils of the local Jesuit college taken pity

on them, and rescued them from the fury of the mob. While the riot was

in progress, the magistracy of Vilna not only failed to defend the Jews,

but even looked on at the proceedings "with great satisfaction."

It is necessary to point out that such manifestation of humaneness on

the part of the Polish college youth was a rare phenomenon, indeed. As a

rule, the students themselves were the initiators of the "tumults" or

disorders in the Jewish quarter, and the scholastic riots referred to

previously did not cease even under John Sobieski. The pupils of the

Catholic academy in Cracow made an attack upon the Jews because of their

refusal to pay the so-called _kozubales_, the scholastic tax which had

been agreed upon between the Jews and the Christian colleges

(1681-1682). In 1687 the tumultuous scholars, this time in Posen, were

joined by the street mob, and for three consecutive days the Jews had to

defend themselves against the rioters with weapons in their hands. The

national Polish Diets condemned these forms of violence, and in their

"constitutions" guaranteed to the Jews inviolability of person and

property, particularly when they found it necessary to raise the

head-tax or impose special levies upon the Jews.

In reality the only defender of the Jews was the King. At his court

appeared the "general syndics," or spokesmen of the Jewish communities,

and presented various applications, which John Sobieski was ready to

grant as far as lay in his power. This humane attitude towards the

"infidels" was on more than one occasion held up against him at the

sessions of the Senate[148] and the Diets. At the Diet held in Grodno in

1693 the enemies of the court brought charges against the Jew Bezalel, a

favorite of the King and a royal tax-farmer, accusing him of desecrating

the Christian religion, embezzling state funds, and other crimes. After

passionate debates, John Sobieski insisted that Bezalel be allowed to

clear himself by oath of the charge of blasphemy, while the other

accusations were disposed of by the chancellor of the exchequer.

During the reign of John Sobieski Polish Jewry fully recuperated from

the terrible ravages of the previous epoch. Under his successors its

position became more and more unfavorable.

5. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL DISSOLUTION

The process of disintegration which had seized the feudal and clerical

structure of the Polish body politic assumed appalling proportions under

the kings of the Saxon dynasty, Augustus II. and Augustus III.

(1697-1763). The political anarchy, which, coupled with the failures in

the Swedish war at the beginning of the eighteenth century, surrendered

Poland into the hands of rejuvenated Russia under Peter the Great, was

only the external manifestation of the inner decay of the country,

springing from its social order, which was founded on the arbitrariness

of the higher and the servitude of the lower estates.[149] In a land in

which every class had regard only for its own selfish interests, in

which the Diets could be broken up by the whim of a single deputy (the

so-called _liberum veto_), the Government did not concern itself with

the common weal, but pursued its narrow bureaucratic interests. In these

circumstances the Jews, being oppressed by all the Polish estates, were

gradually deprived of their principal support, the authority of the

king, which had formerly exercised a moderating influence upon the

antagonism of the classes. True, at the Coronation Diets of Augustus II.

and Augustus III. the old Jewish privileges were officially ratified,

but, in consequence of the prevailing chaos and disorder, the rights,

confirmed in this manner, remained a scrap of paper. Limited as these

rights were, their execution depended on the constant watchfulness of

the supreme powers of the state and on their readiness to defend these

rights against the encroachments of hostile elements. As a matter of

fact, the heedless "Saxon kings," being neglectful of the general

interests of the country, had no special reason to pay attention to the

interests of the Jews. The only concern of the Government was the

regular collection of the head-tax from the Kahals. This question of

taxation was discussed with considerable zeal at the "pacific" Diet of

1717, which had been convened in Warsaw for the purpose of restoring law

and order in the country, sorely shaken by the protracted war with the

Swedish king Charles XII. and the inner anarchy accompanying it. Despite

the fact that the Jews had been practically ruined during that period of

unrest, the amount of the head-tax was considerably increased.

The local representatives of the Government, the voyevodas and

starostas,[150] whose function was to defend the Jews, frequently became

the most relentless oppressors of the people under their charge. These

provincial satraps looked upon the Jewish population merely as the

object of unscrupulous extortion. Whenever in need of money, the

starostas resorted to a simple contrivance to fill their pockets: they

demanded a fixed sum from the local Kahal, and threatened, in case of

refusal, imprisonment and other forms of violence. All they had to do

was to send to jail some member of the Jewish community, preferably a

Kahal elder or an influential representative, and the Kahal was sure to

pay the demanded sum. Occasionally this well-calculated exploitation was

relieved by the aimless mockery of these despots, who were unable to

restrain their savage instincts. Thus the Starosta of Kaniev, in the

Polish Ukraina, desiring to compensate a neighboring landowner for the

murder of his Jewish arendar, gave orders to load a number of Jews upon

a wagon, who were thereupon carried to the gates of his injured neighbor

and thrown down there like so many bags of potatoes. The same Starosta

allowed himself the following "entertainment": he would order Jewish

women to climb an apple-tree and call like cuckoos. He would next

bombard them with small shot, and watch the unfortunate women fall

wounded from the tree, whereupon, laughing merrily, he would throw gold

coins among them.

The most powerful estate in the country, the liberty-loving, or, more

correctly, license-loving Shlakhta, protected the Jews only when in need

of their services. Claiming for himself, in his capacity as slaveholder,

the toil of his peasants, the pan laid equal claim to the toil of the

Jewish business man and arendar who turned the rural products of his

master and the right of "propination," or liquor-selling, into sources

of income for the latter. At one time the Polish landowners even made

the attempt to enslave the Jews on their estates by legal proceedings.

At the Diet of 1740 the deputies of the nobility brought in a

resolution, that the Jews living on Shlakhta estates be recognized as

the "hereditary subjects" of the owners of those estates. This monstrous

attempt at transforming the rural Jews into serfs was rejected solely

because the Government refused to forego the income from Jewish

taxation, which in this case would flow into the pockets of the

landowners.

Nevertheless the rural Jew was to all intents and purposes the serf of

his pan. The latter exercised full jurisdiction over his Jewish arendar

and "factor"[151] as well as over the residents on his estates in

general. During the savage inroads, frequent during this period, of one

pan upon the estate of another, the Jewish arendars were the principal

sufferers. The meetings of the local Diets (or Dietines) and the

conferences of the Shlakhta or the sessions of the court tribunals

became fixed occasions for attacking the local Jews, for invading their

synagogues and houses, and engaging, by way of amusement, in all kinds

of "excesses." The Diet of 1717 held in Warsaw protested against these

wild orgies, and threatened the rioters and the violators of public

safety with severe fines. The "custom" nevertheless remained in vogue.

As far as the cities are concerned, the Jews were engulfed in endless

litigation with the Christian merchant guilds and trade-unions, which

wielded a most powerful weapon in their hands by controlling the city

government or the magistracy. Competition in business and trade was

deliberately disguised beneath the cloak of religion, for the purpose of

inciting the passions of the mob against the Jews. The Christian

merchants and tradesmen found an enthusiastic ally in the Catholic

clergy. The seed sown by the Jesuits yielded a rich harvest. Religious

intolerance, hypocrisy, and superstition had taken deep root in the

Polish people. Religious persecution, directed against all "infidels,"

be they Christian dissidents or Jews "who stubbornly cling to

irreligion," was one of the mainsprings of the inner politics of Poland

during its period of decay.

The enactments of the Catholic synods are permeated by malign hatred of

the Jews, savoring of the spirit of the Middle Ages. The Synod of Lovich

held in 1720 passed a resolution "that the Jews should nowhere dare

build new synagogues or repair old ones," so that the Jewish houses of

worship might disappear in the course of time, either from decay or

through fire. The Synod of 1733 held in Plotzk repeats the medieval

maxim, that the only reason for tolerating the Jews in a Christian

country is that they might serve as a "reminder of the tortures of

Christ and, by their enslaved and miserable position, as an example of

the just chastisement inflicted by God upon the infidels."

6. A FRENZY OF BLOOD ACCUSATIONS

The end of the seventeenth century is marked by the frequency of

religious trials, the Jews being charged with ritual murder and the

desecration of Church sacraments. These charges were the indigenous

product of the superstition and ignorance of the Catholic masses, but

they were also used for propaganda purposes by the clerical party, which

sometimes even took a direct hand in arranging the setting of the crime,

by throwing dead bodies into the yards of Jews, and other similar

contrivances. Such propaganda often resulted in the adoption of violent

measures by the authorities or the mob against the alleged culprits,

leading to the destruction of synagogues and cemeteries and sometimes

culminating in the expulsion of the Jews.

The cases of ritual murder were tried by the highest court, the Tribunal

of Lublin, and, owing to the zeal of the astute champions of the Church,

frequently ended in the execution of entirely innocent persons. The most

important trials of this kind, those of Sandomir (1698-1710), Posen

(1736), and Zaslav (1747), were conducted in inquisitorial fashion.

The Sandomir case was brought about by the action of a Christian woman

who threw the dead body of her illegitimate child into the yard of a

Kahal elder, by the name of Berek,[152] thus giving the clergy a chance

to engineer a ritual murder trial. The case passed through all the

courts of law. It was greatly complicated by the fanatical agitation of

the priest Stephen Zhukhovski, who brought two additional charges of

ritual murder against the Jews of Sandomir, and published, on this

occasion, a book full of hideous calumnies. The case having ended in the

lower courts favorably for the Jews, Zhukhovski succeeded in bringing

about a new trial with the application of tortures and the whole

apparatus of the Inquisition. He finally reached his goal. The Tribunal

of Lublin sentenced the innocent Jewish elder to death; King Augustus

II. ordered, in 1712, the expulsion of all Jews from Sandomir and the

conversion of the synagogue into a Catholic chapel,[153] and the

Catholic clergy placed a revolting picture in the local church

representing the scene of the ritual murder.

To justify the miscarriage of justice, Father Zhukhovski and his

accomplices induced a converted Jew, by the name of Serafinovich, who

posed as a former Rabbi of Brest, and had testified at the Sandomir

trial against the Jews, to write a book, entitled "Exposure of the

Jewish Ceremonies before God and the World" (1716). The book, a mixture

of a lunatic's ravings and an adventurer's unrestrained mendacity,

centers around the argument, that the Jews use Christian blood in the

discharge of a large number of religious and everyday functions. The

Jews are alleged to smear the door of a Christian with such blood, to

predispose the latter in favor of the Jews. The same blood put in an egg

is given to newly-married couples during the marriage ceremony; it is

mixed in the _matza_ eaten on Passover. It is also used for soaking an

incantation formula written by the rabbi, which is then placed under the

threshold of a house, to secure success in business for the Jewish

inmate. In a word, Christian blood is used by the Jews for every

possible form of magic and witchcraft. To convict Serafinovich publicly

of lying, the Jews challenged him to attend a disputation in Warsaw in

the presence of bishops and rabbis. The disputation had been arranged to

be held in the house of the widow of a high official, and both the

Jewish and Christian participants had arrived, but Serafinovich failed

to appear at the meeting, where his trickery and ignorance would have

been exposed. The refusal of the informer to attend the disputation was

attested in an official affidavit. This fact did not prevent an

anti-Semitic monk of Lemberg, by the name of Pikolski, from republishing

Serafinovich's book twice (1758 and 1760) and using it as a tool to

conduct a most hideous agitation against the Jews.

In the large Jewish community of Posen, the slanderous accusations

against the Jews were the reflection of the inveterate hostility of the

local Christian population. Towards the end of the seventeenth century

the Carmelite order in Posen contrived a curious lawsuit against the

Jews, alleging that following upon the desecration of the hosts in

1399[154] the Jews had, by way of penance for their sacrilege, obligated

themselves to accompany the Christian processions. The Jews denied the

allegation, and the case dragged on for a number of years in various

courts of law, with the result that, in 1724, the Jews had to pledge

themselves to furnish the Carmelites with two pails of oil annually to

supply the lamp burning in front of the three hosts in the church.

But the fanaticism of the Church was on the lookout for new victims, and

it manifested itself in 1736 in another ritual murder trial, which

lasted for four years. Everything was pre-arranged in accordance with

the "rites" of the Church fanatics. The dead body of a Christian child

was found in the neighborhood of the city. There was also found a Polish

beggar-woman, who, under torture, confessed that she had sold the child

to the elders of the Posen community. Arrests followed. The first

victims were the preacher, or _darshan_, Arie-Leib Calahora, a

descendant of the martyr Mattathiah Calahora,[155] an elder (_parnas_,

or syndic) of the Jewish community, by the name of Jacob Pinkasevich

(son of Phineas), and several other members of the Kahal administration.

Further wholesale arrests were imminent, but many Jews fled from Posen,

to save themselves from the fury of the inquisitors.

On the eve of his arrest, Calahora chose for the text of his Sabbath

discourse the Biblical verse, "Who can count the dust of Jacob and the

number of the fourth part (or quarter) of Israel? Let me die the death

of the righteous!" (Numbers xxiii. 10). As if anticipating his end, the

preacher explained the text as follows: "Who can count the dust and

ashes of those that were burned and quartered for the faith of Israel?"

While being led to jail, he addressed the crowd of Jews surrounding him

with the following words: "At the hour of my death I shall not have

around me ten Jews for prayer (_minyan_). Therefore recite with me for

the last time the prayer _Borkhu_ ('Praise the Lord of Praise!')." The

forebodings of the preacher were justified. Neither he nor the elder

survived the fiendish tortures of the cross-examination. While the

preacher was tortured, his bones being broken and his body roasted on

fire, the elder was compelled to hold a lamp in his hand to give light

to the executioner. Covered with wounds and blood, in the stage of

mortal agony, they were carried to their homes, where they died in the

autumn of 1736.

The deputies of the Jewish community of Posen appealed to King Augustus

III. against the cruelty and partiality of the municipal court, and

succeeded in having the case transferred to a special judicial

commission consisting of royal officials. Although the commission

resorted equally to tortures during the cross-examination, it was not

able to wrest a confession from the innocent Jewish prisoners.

Nevertheless, being convinced in advance of the correctness of the

ritual libel, the judges sentenced them to be burned at the stake,

together with the bodies of the preacher and elder, which had to be

exhumed for this purpose (1737).

The sentence had first to be ratified by the King, and the Jewish

representatives in Warsaw and Dresden, the latter city being the second

capital of the King and the residence of the papal nuncio, employed

every possible means to bring about a reversal of the judgment. It was

difficult to influence Augustus III., the dull-witted monarch, who, in

addition, was imbued with a goodly dose of anti-Semitism. But the noise

caused by the trial at Posen and the pressure upon the King on the part

of the Jewish bankers of Vienna, particularly the banking-house of

Wertheimer, induced him to yield. After a prolonged interval and a

second revision of the case by a royal commission, the King gave orders

to free the Jews, who had languished in prison for four years (August,

1740). On this occasion he went out of his way to enjoin the magistracy

of Posen not to resort to tortures in similar trials, but he could not

refrain at the same time from prescribing to the Jews "rules of conduct"

after the medieval pattern: not to pass too frequently beyond the

boundaries of their ghetto (which had been preserved in Posen), not to

associate with Christians, nor caress Christian children, nor keep

Christian domestics, nor attend Christian patients, etc.

The favorable issue of the Posen trial was due to the fact that it took

place in a large Jewish community, whose representatives were able to

arouse the public opinion of Western Europe and secure the intervention

of influential persons. But in the distant corners of Poland, in the

obscure Jewish communities of the country, the ritual murder trials were

in the nature of ghastly nightmares. Such was the trial of Zaslav, a

town in Volhynia, which originated in 1747 as the result of a fatal

concatenation of events. In the springtime, when the snow was melting,

the dead body of a Christian was found in a neighboring village, having

been buried beneath the snow for a considerable time. It so happened

that about the same time the functionaries of the Zaslav synagogue

assembled in a neighboring Jewish inn, to celebrate the circumcision of

the new-born son of the innkeeper. A peasant who chanced to pass by the

inn informed the authorities that the Jews had been praying the whole

night as well as eating and amusing themselves, and this suggested to

the Bernardine monks of Zaslav that the celebration had some connection

with ritual murder, the victim of which was the discovered dead body.

The Jewish innkeeper, the Kahal elder, the _hazan_ (cantor), the _mohel_

(surgeon), and the beadle of the Zaslav synagogue, were indicted. The

accused, in spite of dreadful tortures, reiterated that they had

assembled to celebrate a circumcision. Only the youthful beadle Moyshe,

crazed by the tortures, began to murmur something, repeating the words

which were dictated to him by the accusers, though he afterwards

withdrew the confession thus forced from him.[156] The accused were all

sentenced to a monstrous death, possible only among savages. Some of the

accused were placed on an iron pale, which slowly cut into their body,

and resulted in a slow, torturous death. The others were treated with

equal cannibalism; their skin was torn off in strips, their hearts cut

out, their hands and feet amputated and nailed to the gallows. The

memorial prayer for these martyrs concludes with the Biblical words: "O

earth, cover not thou their blood, and let their cry have no place,

until the Lord shall look down from heaven!"

However, the cry of the Zaslav martyrs was drowned by the shouts of the

new victims of the ritual murder myth, which transformed the Christians

who consciously or unconsciously allowed themselves to be infected by

its poison into cannibals.

The Zaslav trial was followed by an uninterrupted succession of ritual

murder accusations, which in the course of fifteen years cropped up

almost annually. The most revolting among them, from the point of view

of the surrounding circumstances, were the trials of Dunaigrod[157]

(1748), Pavolochi[158] and Zhytomir (1753), Yampol[159] (1756),

Stupnitza, near Pshemyshl (1759), and Voislavitza[160] (1760). In the

Zhytomir case, twenty-four Jews were accused of having participated in

the murder of the peasant boy Studzienski. Exhausted by tortures and

prompted by the desire to hasten their end, they confessed to a crime

which they had not committed, and were sentenced to death. Eleven were

flayed alive, while the others saved themselves from death by accepting

baptism. An image of the alleged martyr Studzienski, in the shape of a

figure covered with pins, was spread by the clergy all over the region,

to intensify the hatred against the Jews. In Voislavitza, near Lublin,

the whole Kahal was charged with the murder of a Christian boy for the

purpose of squeezing out his blood and mixing it with the unleavened

bread. The spiritual leaders and elders of the Jewish community were

brought to court. One of the accused, the rabbi, committed suicide while

in jail. The remaining four were sentenced to be quartered. Before the

execution the priest, holding out the promise of leniency, induced the

unfortunate Jews, who had been crazed by their tortures, to embrace

Christianity. The leniency consisted in their being beheaded instead of

being quartered.

Terrorized by these inquisitorial trials, the Jewish communities of

Poland decided, in 1758, to send Jacob Zelig (or Selek)[161] to Rome as

their spokesman, to obtain from Pope Benedict XIV. the promulgation of a

bull forbidding these false accusations against the Jews. In the

application submitted by Zelig it is pointed out that the life of the

Jews of Poland had become intolerable, for "as soon as a dead body is

found anywhere, at once the Jews of the neighboring localities are

brought before the courts on the charge of murder for superstitious

purposes." The application was turned over to Cardinal Ganganelli,

subsequently Pope Clement XIV., who took up the matter very seriously,

and suggested that the Papal Nuncio in Warsaw, Visconti, be instructed

to submit a report of the recent ritual murder trials in Poland. When

the report arrived, Ganganelli composed an elaborate memorandum, in

which, as a result of his investigation of the whole history of the

question, he demonstrated the falsehood of the ritual murder charges

made against the Jews, which had been condemned by the popes in the

Middle Ages, particularly by the bull of Innocent IV. of the year

1247.[162] In the judgment of Ganganelli all the recent Polish trials

were devoid of any basis in fact, and the sentences pronounced by the

courts revolting miscarriages of justice.

Ganganelli's memorandum was examined and approved by the Roman tribunal

of the "Holy Inquisition," and submitted to the new Pope Clement XIII.

The Pope instructed his nuncio in Warsaw to extend his protection to

Zelig, the spokesman of the Jews, on his return to Poland. Subsequently

the nuncio informed the Polish Prime Minister Brühl, that "the Holy See,

having investigated all the foundations of this aberration, according to

which the Jews need human blood for the preparation of their unleavened

bread," had come to the conclusion that "there was no evidence

whatsoever testifying to the correctness of that prejudice" (1763). King

Augustus III. ratified in the same year the ancient charters of his

predecessors, promising the Jews the protection of the law in all ritual

murder cases. Yet it was not easy to eradicate the prejudices which had

been implanted in the minds of the people. Even the educated classes did

not escape their contamination. The contemporary writer Kitovich, in

describing Polish life during the reign of Augustus III., indulges in

the following remark: "Just as the liberty of the Shlakhta is impossible

without the _liberum veto_, so is the Jewish _matza_ impossible without

Christian blood."

7. THE MASSACRE OF UMAN AND THE FIRST PARTITION OF POLAND

Undermined by social and denominational strife, the once flourishing

country was hastening to its ruin. From the election of Stanislav

Augustus Poniatovski to the throne of Poland in 1764, Poland was to all

intents and purposes under the protectorate of Russia. Certain elements

of Polish society began to realize that only by radical reforms could

the country be saved from its impending doom. But it seemed as if the

_régime_ of social and religious fanaticism was too decrepit to pass its

own death-sentence, and awaited its fate from another hand.

In the first years of Stanislav Augustus' reign Polish politics ran in

their accustomed groove. Instead of endeavoring to effect a radical

improvement in the condition of Polish Jewry as one of the most

important elements of the urban population, the new Polish Government

thought only of exploiting them as much as possible for the benefit of

the exchequer. The Diet of 1764, which was held in Warsaw prior to the

election of the King, and discussed the question of internal reforms,

did not consider it necessary to introduce any changes in the status of

the Jews, except to alter the system of Jewish taxation. Formerly the

head-tax had been levied upon all Polish and Lithuanian Jews annually in

a round sum, which the central Jewish agencies, the Waads, or Jewish

Councils, apportioned among the separate Kahals, and the latter, in

turn, allotted to the individual members of the communities. According

to the new "constitution," however, the head-tax, to the extent of two

gulden, was to be imposed on every Jewish soul, and each Kahal was to be

held responsible for the accurate collection from its members. The only

effect of this reform was to swell the total amount of the head-tax,

which as it was weighed heavily upon the Jews, since many sources of

livelihood were closed to them at the same time.

The Shlakhta in turn zealously watched over its class interests, and in

electing the king imposed upon him the obligation of barring the Jews

from the stewardship of crown domains, state taxes, and other financial

revenues. To gratify the hereditary competitors of the Jews--the

Christian burghers and merchants--the Diet of 1768 restored the clause

of the ancient parliamentary Constitution of 1538,[163] by virtue of

which the Jews of those cities where they had not obtained special

privileges were allowed to engage in commerce only with the consent of

the magistracies, and the magistracies were made up of those same

Christian merchants and burghers.

In the meantime, among the Russian population of that portion of the

Ukraina which was situated on the right bank of the Dnieper, and was

still under the sovereignty of Poland, a popular movement arose, which

was directed simultaneously against the Poles and the Jews. It emanated

from the lowest elements of the population, the enslaved village khlops,

who had not yet forgotten the times of Bogdan Khmelnitzki. The memory of

those days when the despised khlops waded in the blood of the proud

Polish pans and the Jews was still fresh in the minds of the Ukrainians,

and made itself felt in moments of political unrest, not infrequent in

the disintegrating body politic of Poland. Fugitive Greek Orthodox

peasants from among the serfs of the pans, itinerant Zaporozhians,[164]

and Cossacks from the Russian part of the Ukraina, often organized

themselves in independent detachments of haidamacks,[165] and indulged

in looting the estates of the nobles or plundering the Jewish towns.

These incursions assumed the character of regular insurrections during

the interregnums and on other occasions of political unrest. Thus, in

1734 and in 1750, detachments of haidamacks, fully organized and led by

Cossack commanders, devastated many towns and villages in the provinces

of Kiev, Volhynia, and Podolia, slaying and robbing many pans and Jews.

The haidamack movement of 1768 was particularly furious. The Russian

Government, which, beginning with the reign of Stanislav Poniatovski,

was practically in control of the affairs of Poland, demanded that the

"dissidents," the Greek Orthodox subjects of the country, be granted not

only complete religious liberty, but also political equality. A

considerable part of the Polish Shlakhta and clergy objected to these

demands, and, seceding from the pro-Russian Government of Poland, formed

the famous Confederacy of Bar,[166] for the defense of the ancient

religious and political order of things against the encroachments of the

foreigners. While the united royal and Russian troops were fighting

against the Confederates, dissatisfaction was brewing among the Greek

Orthodox peasants of the Polish Ukraina. Agitators from among the

Orthodox clergy and the Zaporozhians instigated the peasants to rise for

their faith against the Poles, who had formed the Confederacy of Bar for

the annihilation of Greek Orthodoxy. A fictitious decree of the Russian

Empress Catherine II., known as "the golden Charter," circulated among

the people from hand to hand, giving orders "to exterminate the Poles

and the Jews, the desecrators of our holy religion," in the Ukraina.

The new haidamack movement was headed by the Zaporozhian Cossack

Zheleznyak. Beginning with the month of April of 1768, the rebellious

hordes of Zheleznyak raged within the borders of the present Government

of Kiev, murdering the pans and the Jews and devastating towns and

estates. The haidamacks were wont to hang a Pole, a Jew, and a dog, on

one tree, and to place upon the tree the inscription: "Lakh,[167]

Zhyd,[168] and hound--all to the same faith bound." A terrible massacre

of Jews was perpetrated by the haidamacks in the towns of Lysyanka and

Tetyev, in the province of Kiev.

From there Zheleznyak's hordes moved towards Uman,[169] an important

fortified town, whither, at the first rumor of the rebellion, tens of

thousands of Poles and Jews had fled for their lives. The place was

crowded with refugees to such an extent that the newly-arrived could

find no room in the town itself, and had to camp in tents outside. Uman

belonged to the estate of the Voyevoda of Kiev, a member of the famous

Pototzki family, and was commanded by a governor called Mladanovich.

Mladanovich had at his disposal a Cossack detachment of the court guard

under the command of Colonel Gonta. Despite the fact that Gonta had long

been suspected of sympathizing with the haidamacks, Mladanovich saw fit

to dispatch him with a regiment of these court Cossacks against

Zheleznyak, who was approaching the city. As was to be expected, Gonta

went over to Zheleznyak, and on June 18, 1768, both commanders turned

around and, at the head of their armies, marched upon Uman.

During the first day the city was defended by the Polish pans and the

Jews, who worked shoulder to shoulder on the city wall, fighting off the

besiegers with cannon and rifles. But not all Poles were genuinely

resolved to defend the city. Many of them merely thought of saving their

lives. Governor Mladanovich himself conducted peace negotiations with

the haidamacks, and was reconciled by their assurances that they would

not lay hands on the pans, but would be satisfied with making short work

of the Jews. When the haidamacks, headed by Gonta and Zheleznyak, had

penetrated into the town, they threw themselves, in accordance with

their promise, upon the Jews, who, crazed with terror, were running to

and fro in the streets. They were murdered in beastlike fashion, being

trampled under the hoofs of the horses, or hurled down from the roofs of

the houses, while children were impaled on bayonets, and women were

violated. A crowd of Jews to the number of some three thousand sought

refuge behind the walls of the great synagogue. When the haidamacks

approached the sacred edifice, several Jews, maddened with fury, hurled

themselves with daggers and knives upon the front ranks of the enemy and

killed a few men. The remaining Jews did nothing but pray to the Lord

for salvation. To finish with the Jews quickly, the haidamacks placed a

cannon at the entrance of the synagogue and blew up the doors, whereupon

the murderers rushed inside, turning the house of prayer into a

slaughter-house. Hundreds of dead bodies were soon swimming in pools of

blood.

Having disposed of the Jews, the haidamacks now proceeded to deal with

the Poles. Many of them were slaughtered in their church. Mladanovich

and all other pans suffered the same fate. The streets of the city were

strewn with corpses or with mutilated, half-dead bodies. About twenty

thousand Poles and Jews perished during this memorable "Uman massacre."

Simultaneously smaller detachments of haidamacks and mutinous peasants

were busy exterminating the Shlakhta and the Jews in other parts of the

provinces of Kiev and Podolia. Where formerly the hordes of Bogdan

Khmelnitzki had raged, Jewish blood was again flowing in streams, and

the cries of Jewish martyrs were again heard. But this time the

catastrophe did not assume the same gigantic proportions as in 1648.

Both the Polish and Russian troops co-operated in suppressing the

haidamack insurrection. Shortly after the massacre of Uman, Zheleznyak

and Gonta were captured by order of the Russian General Krechetnikov.

Gonta with his detachment was turned over to the Polish Government, and

sentenced to be flayed alive and quartered. The other haidamack

detachments were either annihilated or taken prisoner by the Polish

commanders.

In this way the Jews of the Ukraina became a second time the victims of

typical Russian pogroms, the outgrowth of national and caste antagonism,

which was rending Poland in twain. The year 1768 was a miniature copy of

the year 1648. A commonwealth in which for many centuries the

relationship between the various groups of citizens was determined by

mutual hatred, could not expect to survive as an independent political

organism. A country in which the nobility despised the gentry, and both

looked down with contempt upon the calling of the merchant and the

burgher, and enslaved the peasant, in which the Catholic clergy was

imbued with hatred against the professors of all other creeds, in which

the urban population persecuted the Jews as business rivals, and the

peasants were filled with bitterness against both the higher and the

lower orders--such a country was bound to perish. And Poland did perish.

The first partition of Poland took place in 1772, transferring the

Polish border provinces into the hands of the three neighboring

countries, Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Russia received the

southwestern border province: the larger part of White Russia, the

present Governments of Vitebsk and Moghilev. Austria took the

southwestern region: a part of present-day Galicia, with a strip of

Podolia. Prussia seized Pomerania and a part of Great Poland,

constituting the present province of Posen. The annexed provinces

constituted nearly a third of Polish territory, with a population of

three millions, comprising a quarter of a million Jews.[170] The great

Jewish center in Poland enters into the chaotic "partitional period"

(1772-1815). Out of this chaos there gradually emerges a new Jewish

center of the Diaspora--that of Russia.

FOOTNOTES:

[120] [Pronounced _Ookraïna_. The spelling "Ukraine" is less correct.

The meaning of the word is "border," "frontier."]

[121] [The author refers to the compulsory establishment of the

so-called Uniat Church, which follows the rites and traditions of the

Greek Orthodox faith, but submits at the same time to the jurisdiction

of the Roman See. The Uniat Church is still largely represented in

Eastern Galicia among the Ruthenians.]

[122] [A contemptuous nickname for Pole.]

[123] [The word "Cossack," in Russian, _Kazak_ (with the accent on the

last syllable), is derived from the Tataric. "Cossackdom"--says

Kostomarov, in his Russian standard work on the Cossack uprising

(_Bogdan Khmelnitzki_, i. p. 5)--"is undoubtedly of Tataric origin, and

so is the very name _Kozak_, which in Tataric means 'vagrant,' 'free

warrior,' 'rider.'" Peter Kropotkin (Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th

edition, vii. 218) similarly derives the word from Turki _Kuzzãk_,

"adventurer," "freebooter."]

[124] [Derived from the German word _Hauptmann_.]

[125] [From the Russian word _Za porogi_, meaning "beyond the Falls"

(scil. of the Dnieper).]

[126] [Literally, "cutting," _i. e._ the cutting of a forest. Originally

the Cossacks entered those regions as colonists and pioneers.]

[127] According to legend, the chief of the district had pillaged

Khmelnitzki's tent, carried off his wife, and flogged his son to death.

[128] [In Polish, _Pokucie_, name of a region in the southeast of the

Polish Empire, between Hungary and the Bukowina. Its capital was the

Galician city Kolomea.]

[129] The clause in question runs as follows: "The Jews, even as they

formerly were residents and arendars on the estates of his Royal

Majesty, as well as on the estates of the Shlakhta, shall equally be so

in the future."

[130] [See p. 98, n. 2.]

[131] [Allusion to Amos v. 19.]

[132] ["Mire of the Deep," from Ps. lxix. 3.--The Hebrew word _Yeven_ is

a play on _Yavan_, "Greek," a term generally applied to the Greek

Orthodox.]

[133] See p. 130.

[134] ["Scroll of Darkness" (comp. Amos iv. 13), with a clever allusion

to the similarly sounding words in Zech. v. 1.]

[135] [In Polish _Szczebrzeszyn_, a town in the region of Lublin.]

[136] ["Troublous Times," allusion to Dan. ix. 25.]

[137] ["Door of Repentance."]

[138] [See p. 98, n. 1.]

[139] [_I. e._ son of Mark, or Mordecai. On "syndics" see p. 111, n. 2.]

[140] [Twenty per cent was the legalized rate of interest in Italy at

the end of the fifteenth century. See Israel Abrahams, Jewish Life in

the Middle Ages, p. 242.]

[141] We quote the following in abbreviated form. [For the complete text

see the article cited in the next note.]

[142] From the Hebrew text it is not clear whether they offered

themselves voluntarily as victims, or whether they were picked out by

others. According to the local tradition in Ruzhany, the former was the

case. [See Dubnow in the Russian Jewish monthly _Voskhod_, July, 1903,

p. 19, n. 1.]

[143] The corresponding word in Hebrew (שלומים), which is marked with

dots in the original, represents the year of the event: [5]420 _aera

mundi_, which equals 1659 C. E.

[144] _I. e._ they tried to convert the martyrs to Catholicism.

[145] [Allusion to Judges ix. 9, where the English version translates

differently. The Hebrew word for "tree" also signifies "wood," and is

used in polemic literature for "cross."]

[146] [See p. 91, n. 1.]

[147] [See p. 96, n. 1.]

[148] [The Senate formed the upper chamber of the Polish parliament.]

[149] In the "Political Catechism of the Polish Republic," published in

1735, we read the following: "Who is it in this vast country that

engages in commerce, in handicrafts, in keeping inns and taverns?"--"The

Jews." ... "What may be the reason for it?"--"Because all commerce and

handicrafts are prohibited to the Shlakhta on account of the importance

of this estate, just as sins are prohibited by the commandments of God

and by the law of nature."--"Who imposes and who pays the taxes?"--"The

taxes are imposed by the nobility, and they are paid by the peasant, the

burgher, and the Jew."

[150] [See above, p. 46, n. 1, and p. 60, n. 1.]

[151] [More exactly, _faktor_, Polish designation for broker, agent, and

general utility man.]

[152] [Popular Polish form of the Jewish name _Baer_.]

[153] The last order was subsequently repealed.

[154] [See p. 55.]

[155] [See pp. 164 and 165.]

[156] According to another version, he expressed his willingness to

embrace Christianity in order to escape death, but afterwards repented.

[157] [In Podolia.]

[158] [In the province of Kiev.]

[159] [In Volhynia.]

[160] [Near Lublin.]

[161] Another variant of the name is _Jelek_. [The latter form is

declared to be incorrect by A. Berliner, _Gutachten Ganganelli's_

(Berlin, 1888), p. 41.]

[162] Of all the accusations of this kind, the Cardinal recognizes the

correctness of only two, the murder of Simon of Trent in 1475 and of

Andreas of Brixen in 1462, adding, however, that even their death was

not caused by the legendary Jewish ritual, but simply by Jewish "hatred

against the Christians."

[163] [See p. 78.]

[164] [See p. 143, n. 2.]

[165] [A word of uncertain origin meaning "rebel" or "rioter." See p.

149.]

[166] [A town in Podolia.]

[167] [See p. 142, n. 1.]

[168] [See p. 320, n. 2.]

[169] [Pronounced _Ooman̄_, with a soft sound at the end. In Polish the

name is spelled _Humań_.]

[170] According to the Polish census of 1764-1766 the number of Jews in

Poland and Lithuania amounted during those years, on the eve of the

partitions, to 621,000 souls.