[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.