FOOTNOTES:
[66] [Unanimi voto et consensu are the exact words of the document. See Bersohn, Dyplomatariusz (Collection of ancient Polish enactments relating to Jews), p. 51.]
[67] [Literally, By-Kahals.]
[69] [Great Poland, Little Poland, Red Russia, and Volhynia. Volhynia at first formed part of the Lithuanian Duchy, but was ceded to the Crown, in 1569, by the Union of Lublin.]
[70] In the middle of the seventeenth century their number was six.
[71] Nathan Hannover, in his Yeven Metzula [see p. [157], n. 1], ed. Venice, 1653, p. 12.
[72] [A Hebrew term designating public-spirited Jews who defend the interests of their coreligionists before the Government. In Polish official documents they are referred to as "General Syndics." In Poland the shtadlans were regular officials maintained by the Jewish community. Comp. the article by L. Lewin, Der Schtadlan im Posener Ghetto, in Festschrift published in honor of Dr. Wolf Feilchenfeld (1907), pp. 31 et seq.]
[73] Towards the end of the sixteenth century Warsaw, instead of Cracow, became the residence of the Polish kings. The Jews had no right of domicile in Warsaw, and were permitted only to visit it temporarily. [See p. [85].]
[76] [The so-called Jüdisch-Deutsch, which was by the Jews brought from Germany to Poland and Lithuania. It was only in the latter part of the seventeenth century that the dialect of Polish-Lithuanian Jewry began to depart from the Jüdisch-Deutsch as spoken by the German Jews, thus laying the foundation for modern Yiddish. See Dubnow's article "On the Spoken Dialect and the Popular Literature of the Polish and Lithuanian Jews in the Sixteenth and the First Half of the Seventeenth Century," in the periodical Yevreyskaya Starina, i. (1909), pp. 1 et seq.]
[77] [I. e. Red Russia, or Galicia.]
[78] Yeven Metzula [see p. [157], n. 1], towards the end.
[79] [Literally, "our teacher," a title bestowed since the Middle Ages on every ordained rabbi.]
[80] [Literally, "companion," "colleague," a title conferred upon men who, without being ordained, have attained a high degree of scholarship.]
[81] [Abbreviation for Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac (d. 1105), a famous French rabbi, whose commentaries on the Bible and the Talmud are marked by wonderful lucidity.]
[82] [A school of Talmudic authorities, mostly of French origin, who, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, wrote Tosafoth (literally, "Additions"), critical and exegetical annotations, distinguished for their ingenuity.]
[83] [Hebrew for "Rows," with reference to the four rows of precious stones in the garment of the high priest (Ex. xxviii., 17)—title of a code of laws composed by Rabbi Jacob ben Asher (died at Toledo ab. 1340). It is divided into four parts, dealing respectively with ritual, dietary, domestic, and civil laws. The Turim was the forerunner of the Shulhan Arukh, for which it served as a model.]
[84] [Isaac ben Jacob al-Fasi (i. e. from Fez in North Africa) (died 1103), author of a famous Talmudic compendium.]
[85] עמודי שש, ed. Lemberg, 1865, pp. 18b, 61b.
[86] It has been conjectured that the same scholar occupied, some time between 1503 and 1520, the post of rector in Poland itself, being at the head of the yeshibah in Cracow.
[87] [Two of his Responsa were published in Cracow, ab. 1540. See Zedner, Catalogue British Museum, p. 695. A new edition appeared in Husiatyn, in 1904, together with Hiddushe Aaron Halevi.]
[88] רמ״א [initials of Rabbi Moses I(א=o)sserles].
[90] Popularly, however, Isserles' supplements are called Haggahoth ("Annotations").
[91] רש״ל [initials of Rabbi SHelomo Luria].
[93] [Allusion to I Kings vii. 23-26.]
[94] [Allusion to Lev. vi. 2.]
[96] [The titles of the various parts of his work are all composed of the word Lebush ("Raiment") and some additional epithet, borrowed, with reference to the author's name, from the description of Mordecai's garments, in Esther viii. 15.]
[97] [The Shulhan Arukh, following the arrangement of the Turim (see above, p. [118], n. 1), is divided into four parts, the fourth of which, dealing with civil law, is called Hoshen Mishpat, "Breastplate of Judgment," with reference to Ex. xxviii. 15.]
[98] [Allusion to Ps. xix. 9.]
[100] מהר״ם [initials of Morenu (see p. [117], n. 1) Ha-rab (the rabbi) Rabbi Meïr.]
[101] מהרש״א [initials of Morenu Ha-rab Rabbi SHemuel E(א=o)dels. Comp. the preceding note].
[102] [Literally, "Teaching Knowledge" (from Isaiah xxviii. 9), the title of the second part of the Shulhan Arukh. See above, p. [128], n. 1.]
[103] ["Rows of Gold," allusion to the Turim (see above, p. [118], n. 1), with a clever play on the similarly sounding words in Cant. i. 11.—Subsequently David Halevi extended his commentary to the other parts of the Shulhan Arukh.]
[104] [Allusion to Mal. ii. 7.—Later Sabbatai extended his commentary to the civil section of the Shulhan Arukh, called Hoshen Mishpat (see p. [128], n. 1).]
[106] [Allusion to Gen. xxv. 27.]
[107] [Allusion to Ps. i. 3.]
[108] ישר מקנדיא [initials of Yosef SHelomo Rofe (physician)].
[109] [In his book Ma`yan Gannim ("Fountain of Gardens," allusion to Cant. iv. 15), Introduction.]
[110] [Kabbalah ma`asith, a phase of the Cabala which endeavors to influence the course of nature by Cabalistic practices, in other words, by performing miracles.]
[111] [Initials of Ashkenazi Rabbi Isaac [Luria]; he died at Safed in Palestine in 1572.]
[112] [Hayyim Vital, also of Safed, died 1620.]
[113] [Abbreviation of SHne Luhoth Ha-brith, "The Two Tables of the Covenant" (Deut. ix. 15).]
[114] ["Hooks of the Pillars," allusion to Ex. xxvii. 11.]
[115] [Allusion to Job xii. 22.]
[116] [See above, p. [91], n. 1. There were, however, considerable differences of opinion among the various factions.]
[117] [A town in the province of Lublin. Jacob became subsequently court physician of Sigismund III.; see Kraushar, Historyja Zydów w Polsce, ii. 268, n. 1. On his name, see Geiger's Nachgelassene Schriften, iii. 213.]
[118] Some deny that he was a Karaite.
[119] [An English translation by Moses Mocatta appeared in London in 1851 under the title "Faith Strengthened.">[
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.