7.16. I. The Jews in Poland

Chapter 3 A Summary of Jewish History I. The Jews in Poland

It would be a weary task to trace the story of the scattered people in fuller detail, or to follow their wanderings in lands not included in the above summary; but it is a striking fact that there is no country in which Jews are found in any appreciable numbers where their history—however bright and promising it may have been for a time—does not end in tragedy. A striking illustration of this is presented by the history of the Jews in Poland. Here, too, as in Spain and Portugal, they could look back to a golden age lasting several centuries, when, as the only middle class between the luxurious, easy-going magnates and the serfs, they were indispensable in the land, and became all-powerful. In the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, when such terrible calamities fell on their brethren in the more “advanced” southern countries of Europe, the Jews in Poland dwelt in peace and prosperity. In the reign of Casimir the Great (1333—70), who seemed to have been much in the power of a Jewish favourite named Esther, who knew how to exercise her influence over the King for the advantage of her people, the Jews seemed to enjoy greater privileges in the land than the Christians. No wonder that it became a land of refuge for many thousands of the persecuted race from all other countries, and that the Jews of Poland and Lithuania became known throughout Europe not only for their worldly prosperity, but also for their Talmudic learning and cabalistic casuistry. But here, too, the Jews could not escape the common fate of the Jewish people since the destruction of Jerusalem. “When the bow of Jewish prosperity was overstrained it snapped in two.”¹ The occasion was as follows: The Cossacks, a people half-savage, composed of escaped Russian convicts, peasants, and adventurers, were permitted to settle on the frontier districts between Poland, Tartary, and Turkey in order that they might be a protection to Poland from attacks by Tartars and Turks. The government of the Cossack colonies, the courts of justice, taxes, the trade in spirit, and other products of the soil—in fact, everything that related to their settlements—was in the hands of Jewish agents, employed by the nobles who owned the land. Not even a baptism or wedding could take place without the Greek Pope obtaining the key of the church from a Jewish custodian. As the Jesuits grew in power in Poland they tried to force the Roman Catholic faith on the Cossacks, and in this they were abetted by the Jews, who hoped to further their own interests with the Polish King by this means. They procured instead only the intensified hatred of the Cossacks, which soon burst forth in a flame of terrible vengeance.

¹ Heman, Geschichte des Jüdischen Volkes. In the first Cossack rising of 1638, which was quickly suppressed, two hundred Jews perished. Confident that their Messiah would appear in the year 1648, and that all power would then be theirs, the Jews continued to abuse the power they possessed. Instead of the vain hope of the advent of the Messiah being realized, 1648 proved to be the commencement of terrible disasters to the Jews. All the Ukraine flamed into war. The Cossacks, under the leadership of the terrible Chmielnicki, joining with the Tartars, beat the Polish army, leading eight thousand Poles, with their prince, captives to Tartary. Then ensued a terrible time, the Cossack companies devastating the whole land as far as Kiev, murdering and spoiling all Jews. The perfidious Poles, not unfrequently, under promise of being spared themselves, gave up the Jews who had taken refuge in their strongholds to the power of their cruel foe; six thousand Jews perished in this way in Nemirow. The Rabbi was spared only till he was made to disclose the hiding-place of the Jews’ treasure, then he, too, fell a victim. At Tulczin fifteen hundred Jews were done to death who would not receive baptism; ten Rabbis were spared for the sake of the ransom which might be wrung from their communities. The Cossacks penetrated into Little Russia, annihilating all Jews. In Homel the Jews were driven naked into the fields, surrounded by the Cossacks, and fifteen hundred men, women, and children, who would not be baptized, were put to barbarous deaths. Thousands fled to Polonnoie, where they were treacherously given over to their foes. Hundreds and thousands of Jews perished in numerous other towns. Hunger and the plague made frightful ravages among the destitute Jewish fugitives. Throughout Podolia, Volhynia, and West Russia the Jews, the nobles, and the clergy shared the same terrible fate. On one occasion a hundred Jewish children were killed and thrown to the dogs. The Cossack leader extorted from the Jesuit prelate-king of Poland, as terms of peace, that Jews should be excluded from living, owing land, or farming, throughout the Ukraine, West Russia, Kiev, and a part of Podolia. In 1651 the war was renewed, and the advantage appeared to be with the Poles. The King now dictated a treaty of peace, with conditions, permitting the Jews their old rights of settlement in the Ukraine; but this did not help them, and only led to fresh disaster. The Cossacks appealed for help to Russia, and now the unhappy Jews of Lithuania and West Poland, hitherto unmolested, had to endure unspeakable sufferings and almost wholesale slaughter. Among other places a terrible massacre took place in Wilna, the capital of Lithuania, and the large Jewish community there was almost annihilated. Then came the invasion of Poland by Charles X. of Sweden, which again brought terrible sufferings to the Jews. Poles, Russians, Cossacks, Swedes, Prussians, and Transylvanians ravaged the land, and the Jews always were especially the victims of their worst ferocity.

Thus the might and prosperity of the Jews in Poland came to an almost sudden and tragic end. Thousands wandered forth into other lands, and those that remained sunk into ever lower depths of poverty and wretchedness.