Listen, ye sons of the tribes of Israel, all ye in whose heart is implanted the image of God Almighty, all that are willing to help in the struggle for the fatherland.... Know ye that now the time hath come to consecrate to this all our strength.... Truly, there are many mighty nobles, children of the Shlakhta, and many great minds who are ready to lay down their lives!... Why then should we who are persecuted not take to arms, seeing that we are the most oppressed people in the world!... Why should we not labor to obtain our freedom which has been promised us just as firmly and sincerely as it has been to others? But first we must show that we are worthy of it.... I have had the happiness of being placed at the head of the regiment by my superiors. Awake then, and help to rescue oppressed Poland. Faithful brethren, let us fight for our country as long as a drop of blood is left in us! Though we ourselves may not live to see this [our freedom], at least our children will live in tranquillity and freedom, and will not roam about like wild beasts. Awake then like lions and leopards!
Berek's language is crude and naïve, and so is his political reasoning. While calling upon the Jews to join "the mighty nobles" in fighting for liberty, he evidently overlooked the fact that the liberty of the Jews was far from being secured by the liberty of the nobles, among whom men with the humanitarian tendencies of a Kosciuszko were few and far between.[231] Berek, however, found solace in the hope that the participation of the Jews in the struggle for Polish independence would bring about a change. He lived at a time when the Jews of Western Europe were eager to display their patriotic sentiments and civic virtues. Before his mind's eye there probably floated the figures of Jews who, since 1789, had served in the garde nationale of Paris.
Berek's enthusiasm succeeded in attracting many volunteers. In a short time a regiment of five hundred men was made up. The Jewish legion, which was hastily equipped with the scanty means supplied by the revolutionary Government and by voluntary contributions, had the checkered appearance of militia. Yet the consciousness of military duty was keen in these men, many of whom carried arms for the first time in their lives. The Jewish regiment displayed its dauntless and self-sacrificing spirit on that fatal November fourth, the day of the terrible onslaught upon Praga by the Russian troops under Suvarov. Among the fifteen thousand Poles who lost their lives in the intrenchments of Praga, in the streets of Warsaw, or in the waves of the Vistula, was also the regiment of Berek Yoselovich. The bulk of the regiment met its fate at the fortifications, being killed by Russian shells or bayonets. Berek himself survived, and fled abroad with General Zayonchek, Kosciuszko's comrade in arms, Kosciuszko himself having been made a Russian prisoner somewhat earlier. Berek was at first arrested in Austria, but he managed to escape and reach France, where he found himself among the Polish revolutionary refugees.
The third partition of Poland, which took place in 1795, transferred to Russia the backbone of the former Jewry of Poland, the dense masses of Lithuania, the provinces of Vilna and Grodno. Prussia absorbed the remainder of Great Poland, including Warsaw and Mazovia,[232] as well as the region of Bialystok. Austria rounded off her possessions in Little Poland by adding the provinces of Cracow and Lublin. Henceforward the fortunes of the Polish Jews are identical with those of their brethren in these three countries, and exhibit a "tricolored" appearance—Austro-Prusso-Russian.
However, even the third partition of Poland was not final as far as the political distribution of territory is concerned. For a short interval the ghost of a semi-independent Poland dances fitfully about. Twelve years after the third partition, Napoleon I., in juggling with the political map of Europe and calling mushroom states into being, snatched the province of Great Poland from the grasp of Prussia, and turned it into the Duchy of Warsaw, a small Polish commonwealth under the rule of the Saxon King Frederick Augustus III., a grandson of Augustus II., the last Polish King of the Saxon dynasty. This took place in 1807, after the crushing blow which Prussia had received at the hands of Napoleon and after the conclusion of the Peace of Tilsit. Two years later, in 1809, when Napoleon had shattered Austria, he tore off a section of her Polish dominions, and joined them to the Duchy of Warsaw.
4. The Duchy of Warsaw and the Reaction under Napoleon
Warsaw, having been cleared of the Prussians, once more became, after an interval of twelve years, the capital of a separate Polish state, resuscitated under the patronage of Napoleon. The Duchy of Warsaw, which was made up of the ten "departments," or districts, of Great and Little Poland, received from her French master a fairly liberal Constitution, two legislative chambers (the Diet and the Senate), and the "Code of Napoleon," which had just been introduced in France. The fundamental laws proclaimed the equality of all citizens; serfdom was abolished, and all class privileges were abrogated.
The Jews too cherished hopes for a better future. The nimbus of Napoleon as the originator of the "Jewish Parliament" and the Parisian Synhedrion, had not yet faded from the minds of the Jews, and they cherished the hope that the Emperor would extend his protection to the Polish Jews as well, but they were grievously disappointed.
The first year of the Duchy of Warsaw (1807-1808) coincided with a critical turn in Napoleon's own policy towards the Jews of France. The "Great Synhedrion" was disbanded, and its disbandment was followed by the humiliating Imperial decree of March 17, 1808, which for a decade checked in almost the entire French Empire the operation of the law providing for Jewish emancipation. This reactionary step was grist to the mill of those sinister forces in Poland which had learned nothing from the violent upheavals their country had undergone, and even now were not able to reconcile themselves to the idea of granting equality to the unloved tribe.