Israel in Europe

by G. F. Abbott

Despite this cruel treatment, the Jews of Prague fought valiantly in defence of the city against the Swedes, and in recognition of their loyalty and gallantry received from the Emperor, Ferdinand III., an imperial standard which can still be seen in the old synagogue of the town.

In the meantime the Jesuits continued their restless, though noiseless, campaign. Even the one traditional refuge of Israel in Europe was poisoned by their preaching. In Poland the Jews had for centuries prospered and enjoyed a kind of autonomy. The Kings protected them, and the nobility, thriftless and extravagant itself, found the sober, industrious, and keen-witted Jews invaluable as bailiffs and financial advisers. Beneath the wing of princes and nobles the Jews acquired great influence. It was to this influence precisely that the Jesuits attributed the rise of heresy in that country, and it was this influence that they now decided to use as a means to their undoing. The rivers of bitterness that flowed from the Stygian fountain of Jesuitism found the field ready to be fertilised. The German traders and artisans, settled in various parts of Poland, had already encountered in the Jews formidable rivals. Commercial envy was invigorated by the pious prejudices which these immigrants had imported, along with their guilds, from the Fatherland; and these feelings often induced them to make common cause with the clergy. ♦1496–1505♦ Under the joint pressure of the two classes, Casimir the Great’s successors had deprived the Jews of their privileges and confined them to special quarters, or even expelled them from certain towns. A period of toleration came with Sigismund I. ♦1507–1548♦ This sovereign’s good-will towards the Jews was aided by the Polish nobles, who, hating the Germans bitterly, were glad to support their rivals—an inclination which they had ample means of gratifying, as the execution of the anti-Jewish laws was largely in their own hands. Thanks to the friendship of the nobility Poland continued to offer an asylum to the persecuted children of Israel.

♦1575–1586♦

Stephen Bathori, who was elected to the Polish throne three years after the death of Sigismund Augustus, the last native King of Poland, showed great favour to the Jews. He guarded the race in Lithuania against the effects of the blood-accusation, and bestowed many benefits upon them, to the disgust of his Christian subjects, who in Poland, as elsewhere, envied the Jews for their prosperity and hated them for their usury and arrogance. ♦1587–1632♦ This prosperity lasted even under Sigismund III., a zealous Catholic brought up by Jesuits. He confirmed to the Jews their ancient privileges, but introduced a measure indicating his religious bias and fraught with disastrous possibilities. ♦1592♦ He ordained that for the building of a new synagogue the permission of the Church should be obtained. About this time the Reformation had lost much of its vigour in Germany; but in Poland, through the German immigrants, it was beginning to create a great spiritual agitation and to find favour among the nobles. Some of the Polish sectarians went to the extreme of Unitarianism and were stigmatised as semi-Judaei.

To all these sources of danger for the Jews—the hatred towards them entertained by the natives on account of their usurious extortions, by the Germans on account of their commercial ability, by the Jesuits on account of their infidelity, and of the Judaic proclivities of some of the Dissenters—was added another, which proved the immediate cause of persecution.

Upon the banks of the lower Dnieper and the north shore of the Black Sea there gradually arose several colonies or settlements formed partly by runaway slaves and convicts in quest of freedom, and partly by adventurers from many countries and classes in quest of fortune. These were the ancestors of the Cossack race. Their life was such as their antecedents promised. Independent and idle, they knew only one industry—brigandage. The exercise of this industry brought them into frequent collision with their Tartar neighbours and supplied them with their one recreation—war. The Kings of Poland, thinking to make use of these hardened and reckless outlaws for the defence of their eastern frontiers, granted to them a semi-autonomous constitution under a freely elected hetman or chieftain. Unfortunately the Cossacks were for the most part members of the Eastern Church, and were therefore hated by the Jesuits, who, after having crushed the Polish heretics, turned their attention to these schismatics. King Sigismund III. began the crusade by oppressing the colonists with heavy taxes.

Now, these colonies were under the control of several noble Polish families which sold the lease of the imposts to their Jewish bailiffs. The latter were intended to act the part for which the training of a thousand years had so well qualified them—the part of the sponge. Thanks to this arrangement, Jewish communities rapidly sprang up and spread in the Ukraine and Little Russia, and to them was entrusted the odious privilege of collecting and even of inventing taxes. How galling these burdens were may be gathered from the following example: The Cossacks were bound to pay a duty on every new-born infant and on every wedding. As a safeguard against evasion, the Jewish tax-farmers kept the keys of the churches, and on each wedding or baptism the clergyman was obliged to apply to them for admittance into his own church. Nor were these tax-farmers scrupulous or lenient in the exercise of their privileges. Slaves to everybody else, they were eager to play the despots over those whom fate had placed under themselves. In their lust for profit and power, they readily helped the nobles in plundering and the Jesuits in tormenting the Cossacks. Hence the position of the Jews in the Ukraine and Little Russia became one of extreme danger, and the resentment which their conduct excited soon translated itself into acts of vengeance. And vengeance, when it fell on Jews, did not restrict itself to the individuals who had deserved it. “All Israelites are surety one for the other” was the Rabbinic motto of solidarity. The Cossacks were now to give a new meaning to this maxim. Where single units had offended, whole communities were punished.

During a brief revolt of the Cossacks, in 1638, two hundred Jews were slain and several synagogues destroyed. The Jews, not warned by this omen, continued to provoke severer punishment with a recklessness which was partly derived from the belief in the near advent of the Messiah. The year 1648 had been fixed by the mystics as the era of triumph and universal sovereignty for Israel.[124] The expected date came, but it brought with it, not redemption, but retribution. In that year there broke out an insurrection led by a Cossack who, having been cheated out of his wife and property by a Jew, had no cause to love the race. Chmielnicki, in declaring to his compatriots that “they had been delivered by the Poles into bondage to the cursed breed of the Jews,” was voicing their wrongs with a conviction deepened by personal suffering.

After their first victory, the wild Cossacks let themselves loose upon the Jews, many of whom were massacred, while others saved themselves by embracing the Orthodox faith. Four Jewish communities, in their anxiety to escape death, gave themselves and their belongings up to the Tartars, who accepted the gift and sold the givers as slaves in Turkey, where they were ransomed by their brethren. The rebellion continued with a ferocity and ruthlessness such as might have been expected from the character of the rebels and the magnitude of the wrongs which they had to avenge. Long oppressed by Papists and Jews, in slaying them they not only gratified their personal animosity, but felt that they were chastising the enemies of their Church. In this somewhat hackneyed work they displayed considerable originality and variety of cruelty. Every guerilla chief had his own favourite instrument of torture; one of them affecting the lasso, by which the women of the enemy were caught and dragged to shame.

Shortly after the first victory, a detachment of Cossacks captured by stratagem a fortress where six thousand Jews had taken refuge, and put them all to torture and death. Another detachment attacked a town harbouring six hundred Polish nobles and two thousand Jews. The two classes, bound together by a common danger, offered a stout resistance, until the crafty Cossacks succeeded in dividing them. They assured the nobles that their sole object was to punish the Jews, promising to withdraw if the latter were surrendered to them. The Jews were persuaded to deliver up their arms; the Cossacks were admitted into the town, robbed the Jews of all their belongings, and then set before them the alternative of baptism or death. Three-fourths of the whole community were tortured and executed. Then the Cossacks turned their wrath against the Polish nobles, whom they easily overpowered and slaughtered.