History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, Volume 1 [of 3]
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Title: History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, Volume 1 [of 3]
Author: Simon Dubnow
Translator: Israel Friedlaender
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE JEWS IN RUSSIA AND POLAND, VOLUME 1 [OF 3] ***
HISTORY OF THE JEWS
IN RUSSIA AND POLAND
FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES
UNTIL THE PRESENT DAY
HISTORY OF THE JEWS
IN RUSSIA AND POLAND
FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES
UNTIL THE PRESENT DAY
BY
S. M. DUBNOW
TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN
BY
I. FRIEDLAENDER
VOLUME I
FROM THE BEGINNING UNTIL THE DEATH OF ALEXANDER I
(1825)
[Illustration]
PHILADELPHIA
THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA
1916
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY
THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
It is not my intention to expatiate in these prefatory remarks on the
present work and its author. A history of the Jews in Russia and Poland
from the pen of S. M. Dubnow needs neither justification nor
recommendation. The want of a work of this kind has long been keenly
felt by those interested in Jewish life or Jewish letters, never more
keenly than to-day when the flare of the world conflagration has thrown
into ghastly relief the tragic plight of the largest Jewry of the
Diaspora. As for the author, his power of grasping and presenting the
broad aspects of general Jewish history and his lifelong, painstaking
labors in the particular field of Russian-Jewish history fit him in
singular measure to cope with the task to which this work is dedicated.
In what follows I merely wish to render account of the English
translation and of the form of the original which it has endeavored to
reproduce.
The translation is based upon a work in Russian which was especially
prepared by Mr. Dubnow for THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA.
Those acquainted with modern Jewish literature in the Russian language
know that the author of our book has treated the same subject in his
general history of the Jewish people, in three volumes, and in a number
of special studies published by him in the periodical _Yevreyskaya
Starina_ ("Jewish Antiquity"). Upon this material Mr. Dubnow has freely
drawn for the present work, after subjecting it to a careful revision,
and so supplementing and co-ordinating it that to all intents and
purposes the book issued herewith is a new and independent publication.
Moreover, the history of Russian Jewry after 1881, comprising the
gruesome era of pogroms and expulsions, has been written by Mr. Dubnow
entirely anew, and will appear for the first time as part of this work.
The present publication may thus properly claim to give the first
comprehensive and systematic account of the history of Russo-Polish
Jewry.
The work is divided into two volumes. The first volume, now offered to
the public, contains the history of the Jews of Russia and Poland from
its beginnings until the death of Alexander I., in 1825. The second
volume will continue the historic narrative up to the very threshold of
the present. The book was originally scheduled to appear at a later
date. The great events of our time, which have made the question of
Russian Jewry a part of the world problem, suggested the importance of
earlier publication. In order that there might be as little delay as
possible in giving the book to the public, the maps and the
bibliographical apparatus were reserved for the second volume. The same
volume, which, it is hoped, will appear in the course of this year, will
contain also the index to the whole work.
My task as translator has been considerably facilitated by the
self-abnegation of the author, who gave me permission to act as editor
and to adapt the original to the requirements of an English version. I
have made frequent use of the privilege accorded to me, and have
endeavored throughout to bridge the wide gap which stretches between the
Russian and American reading public in matters of literary taste. This
editorial activity includes a number of changes in the framework of the
book, which was originally divided into sections of disproportionate
length, and has now been arranged in a more uniform manner. In the
course of this rearrangement, it became necessary to change the wording
of some of the headings so as to bring them into greater conformity with
English literary usage. It should be pointed out, however, that the
changes made are of a stylistic nature, or relate only to the skeleton
of the book. With the exception of a few passages, they leave the
contents untouched, and the responsibility for the latter rests entirely
with the author.
As translator I had resolved to keep myself in the background and act
solely as the interpreter of the author. Much to my regret I found
myself unable to maintain this attitude uniformly. The text was already
in type when it was borne in upon me that the subject of the book,
dealing as it does with the lands of Eastern Europe, was a _terra
incognita_ to the average American reader, and that many things in it
must perforce be wholly or partly unintelligible to him if left without
an explanation. There was nothing for me to do but to step into the
breach and supply the deficiency. I did so by adding a number of
footnotes, which, in distinction from those of the author, are placed in
brackets. With very few exceptions these notes are not of a
supplementary, but of an explanatory, nature. They are confined to such
information as the reader may need to grasp the full bearing of the
text. I trust that in some small measure these detached notes may serve
instead of a systematic account of the general development of Eastern
Europe, which, it was originally hoped, might be supplied by the
authoritative pen of Mr. Dubnow himself, as a background for the history
of Russo-Polish Jewry. An attempt in this direction, within a narrow
compass and with no pretense to completeness, has been undertaken by
the present writer in a recent publication of his own.[1]
A word must be said concerning the spelling of foreign names and terms,
which are naturally numerous in a work like the present. After
considerable deliberation I decided on the phonetic method, as being the
most convenient from the point of view of the reader. I have
consequently endeavored to reproduce, as far as possible, the original
sounds of all foreign words in English characters. In conformity with
this principle, I have adopted the spelling _Tzar_, instead of _Czar_.
As far as I am aware, the only exception is the Russian word _ukase_,
which reflects in its spelling the effect of French transmission, and is
to be pronounced _ookaz_, with the accent on the last syllable. Needless
to say I have had to resort to artificial contrivances to indicate those
sounds which are unknown in English, but I have reduced these
contrivances to a minimum. They are as follows: _zh_ represents the
Slavic sound which corresponds to French _j_; _kh_ stands for the sound
which is to be pronounced like hard German _ch_ (as in _lachen_, not as
in _brechen_); _tz_ is the equivalent of a Slavic letter which is to be
pronounced like German _z_. To avoid mispronunciation, _g_ in all
foreign words has been spelled _gh_ before _e_ and _i_. _U_ in these
words is to be pronounced like _oo_, and _a_ like French and short
German _a_. With every desire for uniformity, I have yet little doubt
that inconsistencies will be found, particularly in the transliteration
of Hebrew, which, as a Semitic idiom, is more difficult of phonetic
reproduction than are even the Slavic languages. I hope that these
inconsistencies are not numerous enough to be offensive.
The method of transliteration referred to in the foregoing presents a
special difficulty in the case of Polish names, in view of the fact that
the Polish language uses the general European alphabet, and that the
Polish spelling of such names has found access to other languages. In
some instances even the question of identity may arise. Thus, to quote
but one example out of many, the name _Chmielnicki_, written in this
form in Polish, differs considerably from the phonetic spelling
_Khmelnitzk_i, adopted in this volume. To meet this difficulty, the
index to this work will give all Polish names and expressions both in
their transliterated English forms and in their original Polish
spelling.
In conclusion, it is my pleasant duty to record my appreciation of the
help rendered me in my task. I am indebted to the Honorable Mayer
Sulzberger for his great kindness in reading the proofs of this volume
and in giving me the benefit of his subtle literary judgment. Professor
Alexander Marx has assisted me by reading the proofs and making a number
of suggestions. My thanks are finally due to Miss Henrietta Szold for
her indefatigable and most valuable co-operation.
I. F.
NEW YORK, May 19, 1916.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] "The Jews of Russia and Poland. A Bird's-Bye View of Their History
and Culture" (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1915). To avoid any misconception on
the part of the reader, I desire to point out that the aim and scope of
my little volume are totally different from those of Mr. Dubnow's work.
As indicated in the title of my sketch, and as stated in the preface to
it, my purpose was none other than to present a "bird's-eye view" of the
subject, to point out the large bearings of the problem, with no
intention on my part "to offer new and independent results of
investigation." The publication is based on a course of lectures
delivered by me before the Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate
Learning in Philadelphia in March, 1915. My natural reluctance to
anticipate Mr. Dubnow's large work was overcome by the encouragement of
several friends, among them Mr. Dubnow himself, who, from their
knowledge of public affairs, thought that a succinct, popular
presentation of the destinies of the Jews in the Eastern war area was a
word in due season.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE JEWISH DIASPORA IN EASTERN EUROPE
1. The Jewish Settlements on the Shores of the Black Sea 13
2. The Kingdom of the Khazars 19
3. The Jews in the Early Russian Principalities
and in the Tataric Khanate of the Crimea 29
II. THE JEWISH COLONIES IN POLAND AND LITHUANIA
1. The Immigration from Western Europe during
the Period of the Crusades 39
2. The Charter of Prince Boleslav and the Canons
of the Church 43
3. Rise of Polish Jewry under Casimir the Great 50
4. Polish Jewry during the Reign of Yaghello 54
5. The Jews of Lithuania during the Reign of Vitovt 58
6. The Conflict between Royalty and Clergy under
Casimir IV. and His Sons 61
III. THE AUTONOMOUS CENTER IN POLAND AT ITS ZENITH (1501-1648)
1. Social and Economic Conditions 66
2. The Liberal Régime of Sigismund I. 70
3. Liberalism and Reaction in the Reigns of Sigismund
Augustus and Stephen Batory 83
4. Shlakhta and Royalty in the Reigns of Sigismund
III. and Vladislav IV. 91
IV. THE INNER LIFE OF POLISH JEWRY AT ITS ZENITH
1. Kahal Autonomy and the Jewish Diets 103
2. The Instruction of the Young 114
3. The High-Water Mark of Rabbinic Learning 121
4. Secular Sciences, Philosophy, Cabala, and Apologetics 131
V. THE AUTONOMOUS CENTER IN POLAND DURING ITS DECLINE (1648-1772)
1. Economic and National Antagonism in the Ukraina 139
2. The Pogroms and Massacres of 1648-1649 144
3. The Russian and Swedish Invasions (1654-1658) 153
4. The Restoration (1658-1697) 158
5. Social and Political Dissolution 167
6. A Frenzy of Blood Accusations 172
7. The Massacre of Uman and the First Partition of Poland 180
VI. THE INNER LIFE OF POLISH JEWRY DURING THE PERIOD OF DECLINE
1. Jewish Self-Government 188
2. Rabbinical and Mystical Literature 198
3. The Sabbatian Movement 204
4. The Frankist Sect 211
5. The Rise of Hasidism and Israel Baal-Shem-Tob 220
6. The Hasidic Propaganda and the Growth of Tzaddikism 229
7. Rabbinism, Hasidism, and the Forerunners of Enlightenment 235
VII. THE RUSSIAN QUARANTINE AGAINST JEWS (TILL 1772)
1. The Anti-Jewish Attitude of Muscovy during the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 242
2. The Jews under Peter I. and His Successors 246
3. Elizabeth Petrovna and the First Years of Catherine II. 254
VIII. POLISH JEWRY DURING THE PERIOD OF THE PARTITIONS
1. The Jews of Poland after the First Partition 262
2. The Period of the Quadrennial Diet (1788-1791) 278
3. The Last Two Partitions and Berek Yoselo 291
4. The Duchy of Warsaw and the Reaction under Napoleon 298
IX. THE BEGINNINGS OF THE RUSSIAN RÉGIME
1. The Jewish Policy of Catherine II. (1772-1796) 306
2. Jewish Legislative Schemes during the Reign of Paul I. 321
3. Dyerzhavin's "Opinion" on the Jewish Problem 328
X. THE "ENLIGHTENED ABSOLUTISM" OF ALEXANDER I.
1. "The Committee for the Amelioration of the Jews" 335
2. The "Jewish Constitution" of 1804 342
3. The Projected Expulsion from the Villages 345
4. The Patriotic Attitude of Russian Jewry during
the War of 1812 355
5. Economic and Agricultural Experiments 359
XI. THE INNER LIFE OF RUSSIAN JEWRY DURING THE PERIOD
OF "ENLIGHTENED ABSOLUTISM"
1. Kahal Autonomy and City Government 366
2. The Hasidic Schism and the Intervention of the Government 371
3. Rabbinism, Hasidism, and Enlightened "Berlinerdom" 379
XII. THE LAST YEARS OF ALEXANDER I.
1. "The Deputation of the Jewish People" 390
2. Christianizing Endeavors 396
3. "Judaizing" Sects in Russia 401
4. Recrudescence of Anti-Jewish Legislation 403
6. The Russian Revolutionaries and the Jews 409
CHAPTER I
THE JEWISH DIASPORA IN EASTERN EUROPE
1. THE JEWISH SETTLEMENTS ON THE SHORES OF THE BLACK SEA
From the point of view of antiquity the Jewish Diaspora in the east of
Europe is the equal of that in the west, though vastly its inferior in
geographic expansion and spiritual development. It is even possible that
the settlement of Jews in the east of Europe antedates their settlement
in the west. For Eastern Europe, beginning with Alexander the Great,
received its immigrants from the ancient lands of Hellenized Asia, while
the immigration into Western Europe proceeded in the main from the Roman
Empire, the heir to the Hellenic dominion of the East.
Among the ancient Jewish settlements in Eastern Europe the colonies
situated on the northern shores of the Black Sea, now forming a part of
the Russian Empire, occupy a prominent place.
Far back in antiquity the Greeks of Asia Minor and the Ionian Islands
gravitated towards the northern shores of the Pontus Euxinus, the
fertile lands of Tauris--the present Crimea.[2] Beginning with the sixth
century B.C.E., they established their colonies in those parts, whence
they exported corn to their homeland, Greece. When, after the conquests
of Alexander the Great, Judea became a part of the Hellenistic Orient,
and sent forth the "great Diaspora" into all the dominions of the
Seleucids and Ptolemies, one of the branches of this Diaspora must have
reached as far as distant Tauris. Following in the wake of the Greeks,
the Jews wandered thither from Asia Minor, that conglomerate of
countries and cities--Cilicia, Galatia, Miletus, Ephesus, Sardis,
Tarsus--which harbored, at the beginning of the Christian era, important
Jewish communities, the earliest nurseries of Christianity. In the first
century of the Christian era, which marks the consolidation of the Roman
power over the Hellenized East, we meet in the Greek colonies of Tauris
with fully organized Jewish communities, which undoubtedly represent
offshoots of a much older colonization.
During the same period there flourished in the Crimea and on the
adjacent shores of the Black and Azov Seas, called by the Greeks Pontus
and Maeotis, in the lands of the Scythians, Sarmatians, and Taurians, a
number of diminutive Greek city-republics--Cimmerian Bosporus, or
Panticapaeum (at present Kerch), Phanagoria (the Taman Peninsula),
Olbia, Gorgippia (now Anapa), and others. The most active of these
colonies was Bosporus-Panticapaeum, which was situated at the confluence
of the Black and Azov Seas. The kings, or archonts, of Bosporus, of the
Greek dynasty of the Rhescuporides, acknowledged the sovereignty of
Rome. They styled themselves, in accordance with the customary formula,
"friends of the Caesars and the Romans," and frequently added to their
title the Roman dynastic appellation "Tiberius-Julius." The Jewish
historian Josephus Flavius, in depicting the irresistible sway of the
Roman world-power in his time, refers to this colony in the following
terms: "Why need I speak of the Heniochi and Colchians and the nation of
the Tauri, and those who inhabit the Bosporus and the nations about
Pontus and Maeotis ... who are now subject to three thousand armed men,
and where forty long ships keep in peace the sea which before was
unnavigable, and is very tempestuous?" (Bell. Jud. II. xvi. 4.) These
words were written shortly after the downfall of Judea, about the year
80 of the Christian era.
Now from practically the same year (80-81) date the Greek inscriptions
which were discovered on the soil of ancient Bosporus in Tauris,
testifying to the existence there of a well-organized Jewish community,
with a house of prayer. The following is the text of one of these
inscriptions, engraved on a marble tablet which is kept in the Hermitage
of Petrograd:
In the reign of King Tiberius Julius Rhescuporides, the pious
friend of the Caesars and the Romans, in the year 377,[3] on the
twelfth day of the month of Peritios, I, Chresta, formerly the
wife of Drusus, declare in the house of prayer (προσευχή) that
my foster-son Heracles is free once [for all], in accordance
with my vow, so that he may not be captured or annoyed by my
heirs, and may move about wherever he chooses, without let or
hindrance, except for [the obligation of visiting] the house of
prayer for worship and constant attendance. [Done] with the
approval of my heirs Iphicleides and Heliconias, and with the
participation of the Synagogue of the Jews in the guardianship
(συνεπιτροπευούσης δὲ καὶ τῆς συναγωγῆς τῶν Ἰουδαίων).
This inscription, paralleled by a similar document of the same period,
was evidently meant to certify the act of liberating a slave, which,
according to custom, was performed publicly, in the "house of prayer,"
with the participation of the representatives of the Jewish
community.[4]
The contents of the inscriptions enable us to draw the following
conclusions bearing on the history of the Jews during that period:
1. The Jewish community in Taurian Bosporus was made up of
Hellenized Jews, who employed the Greek language in their
religious and civil documents, and called themselves by Greek
names (Chresta, Drusus, Heracles, Artemisia, etc.). 2. While
assimilated to the Greeks in point of language, they were firmly
united among themselves by the bond of religion, as is shown by
the obligation, imposed even on the freedman, the _libertinus_,
to visit the house of prayer for worship. 3. The Jewish
community enjoyed a certain amount of civil autonomy, as shown
in the case cited above, in which the community appears in the
rôle of a juridical person, acting as the guardian of the
liberated slaves.
It is to be assumed that similar communities of Hellenized Jews were
found in the other Greek colonies of Tauris, their population being
constantly swelled by the influx of immigrants from Asia Minor, Syria,
and Egypt, particularly from Judeo-Hellenistic Alexandria. Since these
communities of the first Christian century appear to have been
well-organized and to have possessed their own institutions, we are safe
in assuming that they were preceded by a more primitive phase of
communal Jewish life, in the shape of petty settlements and trading
stations, which must have arisen in earlier centuries.
From the first centuries of the Christian era date a number of
tombstones bearing representations of the holy candlestick, the Menorah.
The religious influence of Judaism in Tauris and in the Azov region is
attested by various other indications. The inscriptions contain several
references to "those who fear God the Most High" (σεβόμενοι θεὸν ὕψιστον),
a phrase applied in the Greco-Roman world to pagans who stand half-way
between polytheism on the one hand and Judaism or primitive Christianity
on the other.
The Judeo-Hellenistic Diaspora in Tauris, on the northern shores of the
Black Sea, was, like its parent stock in Asia Minor, the center of a
Christian propaganda. Towards the end of the third century we find in
Chersonesus, near Sevastopol, Christian bishops wielding considerable
power. The exercise of this power was evidently responsible for the
pagan rebellion of which we read in the lives of the Christian martyrs
Basil and Capiton. On the sixth of December of the year 300 the pagan
inhabitants rose in revolt against these two bishops and their
fellow-missionaries, and were joined by the Jews, whom, it would seem,
the zealots of the new faith had endeavored equally to drag into the
bosom of the Church.
The existence of a Jewish settlement in the Bosporan kingdom was also
known to St. Jerome, the famous Church father, who lived at the end of
the fourth century in far-off Palestine. On the authority of his Jewish
teacher he applied verse 20 in Obadiah, "and the captivity of Jerusalem
which is in Sepharad," to the Taurian Bosporus, the remotest corner of
the Jewish Diaspora.[5]
With the division of the Roman Empire into two halves the Greco-Judean
colonies on the Black Sea were naturally drawn into the sphere of
influence of the eastern part, the Empire of Byzantium, the capital of
which, Constantinople, was situated on the opposite coast of the Black
Sea. Commercial relations brought the Taurian colony into ever closer
contact with the metropolis of Byzantium, and the Jews vied with the
Greeks in the promotion of trade. The persecutions of the militant
Church of Byzantium under the Emperors Theodosius II., Zeno, and
Justinian, during the fifth and sixth centuries, drove the Jews from the
ancient provinces of the Empire into the Taurian colonies. In the eighth
century the Jewish population of these colonies was so numerous that the
Byzantine chronicler Theophanes places the Jews in the forefront of the
various groups of the population. "In Phanagoria and the neighboring
region," says Theophanes, "the Jews who live there are surrounded by
many other tribes."
These colonies were frequently visited by Christian missionaries, who
endeavored to convert the native population to their faith, and
incidentally also to win over the Jews. The Patriarchs of Constantinople
were then hopeful of drawing the people of the Old Testament into the
fold of the New. The Patriarch Photius, of the ninth century, writes
thus to the Bishop of Bosporus (Kerch): "Wert thou also to capture the
Judeans there, securing their obedience unto Christ, I should welcome
with my whole soul the fruits of such beautiful hopes." The "Judeans,"
however, not only did not take the bait of the missionaries, but even
managed to spoil their propaganda among the pagans. The most illustrious
of all Byzantine missionaries, Cyril and Methodius, had frequent
occasion to quarrel with "the Judeans, who blaspheme the Christian
faith," and the boastful ecclesiastic legend asserts that the holy
brothers "by prayer and eloquence defeated the Judeans [in disputes] and
put them to shame" (about 860).
The struggle between the Christian missionaries and the Jews during that
period had for its object the Khazar nation, part of whom had embraced
Judaism.
2. THE KINGDOM OF THE KHAZARS
While Byzantium was pressing on the Euxine colonies from the west,
endeavoring to draw them, together with the adjoining lands of the
Slavs, into the sphere of Christian civilization, a new power from the
east, from the Caucasus and the Caspian region, came rushing along in
the same direction. We refer to the Khazars, or Kazars.[6] Forming
originally a conglomerate of Finno-Turkish tribes, the warlike Khazars
appeared in the Caucasus during the "migration of nations," and began to
make inroads into the Persian Empire of the Sassanids, often acting as
the tools of Persia's rival, Byzantium. The great Arabic conquests of
the seventh century and the rise of the powerful Eastern Caliphate
checked the movement of the Khazars towards the East, and turned it
westward, to the shores of the Caspian Sea, the mouths of the Volga and
the Don, the Byzantine colonies on the Black and Azov Seas, and, in
particular, the flourishing region of Tauris. At the mouth of the Volga,
where the mighty river joins the Caspian Sea, near the present city of
Astrakhan, arose the kingdom of the Khazars with its capital Ityl, the
name originally designating the river Volga. From there the bellicose
Khazars made constant raids upon the Slavonian tribes far and near, to
the very gates of Kiev, forcing them to become their tributaries.
Another Khazar center was established in the Crimea, among Byzantine
Greeks and Jews. From the Crimea the Khazars pressed forward in the
direction of Byzantium and the Balkan Peninsula, constituting a serious
menace to the Roman Empire of the East. As a rule, the Byzantine
emperors concluded alliances with the kings, or khagans, of the Khazars,
checking their unbridled energy by means of concessions and the payment
of tribute. In Constantinople the illusion was fostered that the Church,
and with it Byzantine diplomacy, were in the end bound to triumph over
all the Khazars--by converting them to Christianity. With this purpose
in view, missionaries were dispatched from Byzantium, while the local
bishops of Tauris were working zealously to the same end. But the task
proved extremely difficult, for the Greek Church found itself face to
face with a powerful rival in Judaism, which succeeded in establishing
its hold on a part of the Khazar nation.
While yet in their pagan state, the Khazars were exposed at one and the
same time to the influences of three religions: Mohammedanism, which
pursued its triumphant march from the Arabic Caliphate; Christianity,
which was spreading in Byzantium, and Judaism, which, headed by the
Exilarchs and Gaons of Babylonia, was centered in the Caliphate, while
its ramifications spread all over the Empire of Byzantium and its
colonies on the Black Sea. The Arabs and the Byzantines succeeded in
converting several groups of the Khazar population to Islam and
Christianity, but the lion's share fell to Judaism, for it managed to
get hold of the royal dynasty and the ruling classes.
The conversion of the Khazars to Judaism, which took place about 740, is
described circumstantially in the traditions preserved among the Jews
and in the accounts of the medieval Arabic travelers:
The King, or Khagan, of the Khazars, by the name of Bulan, had
resolved to abandon paganism, but was undecided as to the
religion he should adopt instead. Messengers sent by the Caliph
persuaded him to accept Islam, envoys from Byzantium endeavored
to win him over to Christianity, and representatives of Judaism
championed their own faith. As a result, Bulan arranged a
disputation between the advocates of the three religions, to be
held in his presence, but he failed to carry away any definite
conviction from their arguments and mutual refutations.
Thereupon the King invited first the Christian and then the
Mohammedan, and questioned them separately. On asking the former
which religion he thought was the better of the two, Judaism or
Mohammedanism, he received the reply: Judaism, since it is the
older of the two, and the basis of all religions.[7] On asking
the Mohammedan, which religion he preferred, Judaism or
Christianity, he received the same reply in favor of Judaism,
with the same motivation. "If that be the case," Bulan argued in
consequence, "if both the Mohammedan and the Christian
acknowledge the superiority of Judaism to the religion of their
antagonist, I too prefer to adopt the Jewish religion." Bulan
accordingly embraced Judaism, and many of the Khazar nobles
followed his example.
According to the Jewish sources, one of Bulan's descendants, the Khagan
Obadiah, was a particularly zealous adherent of Judaism. He
invited--possibly from Babylonia--many Jewish sages to his country, to
instruct the converted Khazars in Bible and Talmud, and he founded
synagogues, and established Divine services.
In the ninth and tenth centuries, the kingdom of the Khazars, governed
by rulers professing the Jewish faith, attained to outward power and
inner prosperity. The accounts of the Arabic writers of that period
throw an interesting light on the inner life of the Khazars, which was
marked by religious tolerance. The king of the Khazars and the governing
classes professed the Jewish religion. Among the lower classes the three
monotheistic religions were all represented, and in addition a
considerable number of pagans still survived. In spite of the fact that
royalty and nobility professed Judaism, the principle of religious
equality was never violated. The khagan had under him seven (according
to another version, nine) judges: two for the followers of the Jewish
religion, two each for the Christians and Mohammedans, and one for the
pagans--the Slavs, the Russians, and other races. Only occasionally did
the Khazar king show signs of intolerance, particularly when rumors
concerning Jewish persecutions in other countries came to his ears.
Thus, on one occasion, about 921, on being informed that the Mohammedans
had destroyed a synagogue somewhere in the land of Babunj, the Khagan
gave orders to destroy the tower (minaret) of a certain mosque and to
kill the muezzins (the heralds who call to prayer), explaining his
attitude in these words: "I should have destroyed the mosque itself, had
I not feared that not a single synagogue would be left standing in the
lands of the Mohammedans."
In the kingdom of the Khazars, favorably situated as it was between the
Caliphate of Bagdad and the Byzantine Empire, the Jews evidently played
an important economic rôle. During the ninth and tenth centuries the
territory of the Khazars was traversed by one of the great trade routes
which connected the three parts of the Old World. According to the
testimony of Ibn Khordadbeh, an Arabic geographer of the ninth century,
Jewish merchants, who were able to speak the principal Asiatic and
European languages, "traveled from West to East and from East to West,
on sea and by land." The land route led from Persia and the Caucasus
"through the country of the Slavs, near the capital of the Khazars" (the
mouth of the Volga), by crossing the Sea of Jorjan (the Caspian Sea).
Another Arabic writer, named Ibn Fakih,[8] who wrote shortly after 900,
testifies that on the route of the "Slav merchants," who were trading
between the Sea of the Khazars (the Caspian Sea) and that of Rum (the
Byzantine or Black Sea), was found the Jewish city of Samkers, on the
Taman Peninsula, near the Crimea.[9]
During this period of prosperity the kingdom of the Khazars received a
considerable Jewish influx from Byzantium, where the Jews were
persecuted by Emperor Basil the Macedonian (867-886), being forcibly
converted to Christianity, while hundreds of Jewish communities were
devastated. The Jewish emigrants from Byzantium were naturally attracted
towards a land in which Judaism was the religion of the Government and
the Court, though equal toleration was accorded to all other religions.
The well-known Arabic writer Masudi refers to this Jewish immigration in
the following passage:
The population of the Khazar capital consists of Moslems,
Christians, Jews, and pagans. The king, his court, and all
members of the Khazar tribe profess the Jewish religion, which
has been the dominant faith of the country since the time of the
Caliph Harun ar-Rashid. Many Jews who settled among the Khazars
came from all the cities of the Moslems and the lands of Rum
(Byzantium), the reason being that the king of Rum persecuted
the Jews of his empire in order to force them to adopt
Christianity.... In this way a large number of Jews left the
land of Rum in order to depart to the Khazars.
This testimony dates from the year 954. Contemporaneous with it is the
extremely interesting correspondence between Joseph, the Khagan of the
Khazars, and Hasdai Ibn Shaprut, the Jewish statesman of the Cordova
Caliphate in Spain. Being a high official at the court of Abderrahman
III., Hasdai maintained diplomatic relations with the emperors of
Byzantium and other rulers of Asia and Europe, and in this way came to
learn of the Khazar kingdom, through the Persian and Byzantine
ambassadors. The news of the existence of a land somewhere beyond the
seas where a Jew sat on the throne, and Judaism was the religion of the
state, filled Hasdai with joy. Firmly convinced that he had found the
clue to the lost Jewish kingdom of which popular Jewish tradition had so
much to tell, the Jewish statesman at the Moslem court felt the burning
need of getting in touch with the rulers of Khazaria, and, in case the
rumors should prove correct, of transferring his abode thither and
devoting his powers of statesmanship to his fellow-Jews. Prolonged
inquiries elicited the information that the land of the Khazars lay
fifteen days by sea from Constantinople, that it stood in commercial
relations with Byzantium, that the name of its present ruler was Joseph,
and that the safest means of communicating with him was by way of
Hungary, Bulgaria, and Russia. After several vain attempts to get in
touch with the ruler of the Khazars Hasdai finally succeeded in having
an elaborate Hebrew epistle delivered into the hands of King Joseph
(about 955).
In his epistle Hasdai first gives an account of himself and his position
at the court of Cordova, and then proceeds to beg the King of the
Khazars to inform him in detail of the rise and present status of "the
Jewish kingdom," being anxious to find out "whether there is anywhere a
soil and a kingdom where scattered Israel is not subject and subordinate
to others."
Were I to know--Hasdai continues--that this is true, I should
renounce my place of honor, abandon my lofty rank, forsake my
family, and wander over mountains and hills, by sea and on land,
until I reached the dwelling-place of my lord and sovereign,
there to behold his greatness and splendor, the seats of his
subjects, the position of his servants, and the tranquillity of
the remnant of Israel.... Having been cast down from our former
glory, and now living in exile, we are powerless to answer those
who constantly say unto us: "Every nation hath its own kingdom,
while you have no trace [of a kingdom] on earth." But when we
received the news about our lord and sovereign, about the power
of his kingdom and the multitude of his hosts, we were filled
with astonishment. We lifted our heads, our spirit revived, and
our hands were strengthened, the kingdom of my lord serving us
as an answer. Would that this rumor might increase in strength
[_i. e._ be verified], for thereby will our greatness be
enhanced!
After long and painful waiting Hasdai received the King's reply. In it
the ruler of the Khazars gives an account of the heterogeneous
composition of his people and the various religions professed by it. He
describes how King Bulan and his princes embraced the Jewish faith after
testing the various rival creeds, and how zealously it was upheld by the
Kings Obadiah, Hezekiah, Manasseh, Hanukkah, Isaac, Zebulun, Moses (or
Manasseh II.), Nissi, Aaron, Menahem, Benjamin, Aaron (II.), the last
being the father of the writer, King Joseph. The King continues:
I reside [_i. e._ my residence is situated] at the mouth of the
river Ityl [Volga]; at the end of the river is found the Sea of
Jorjan [the Caspian Sea]. The beginning of the river is towards
the east, at a distance of a four months' journey. Along the
banks of the river there are many nations living in towns and
villages, in open as well as fortified places. These are their
names: Burtas, Bulgar, Suvar, Arisu, Tzarmis, Venentit, Sever,
Slaviun.[10] Each of these nations is very numerous, and all of
them are tributary to me. From there the boundary turns towards
Buarezm [probably Khwarism], up to Jorjan, and all the
inhabitants of the sea-shore, for a distance of one month's
journey, are tributary to me. To the south are found Semender,
Bak-Tadlud, up to the gates of Bab al-Abwab, which are situated
on the coast.[11] ... To the west there are Sarkel, Samkrtz,
Kertz, Sugdai, Alus, Lambat, Bartnit, Alubika, Kut, Mankup,
Budak, Alma, and Gruzin.[12] All these localities are situated
on the shores of the Sea of Kostantinia[13] towards the west....
They are all tributary to me. Their dwellings and camping-places
are scattered over a distance of a four months' journey.
Know and take notice that I live at the mouth of the river
[Volga], and with the help of the Almighty I guard the entrance
to this river, and prevent the Russians, who arrive in vessels,
from passing into the Caspian Sea for the purpose of making
their way to the Ishmaelites [Mohammedans]. In the same manner
I keep the enemies on land from approaching the gates of Bab
al-Abwab. Because of this I am at war with them, and were I to
let them pass but once, they would destroy the whole land of
the Ishmaelites as far as Bagdad.... Our eyes are [turned] to
God and to the wise men of Israel who preside over the
academies of Jerusalem and Babylon. We are far away from Zion,
but it has come to our ears that, on account of our sins, the
calculations [concerning the coming of the Messiah] have become
confused, so that we know nothing. May it please the Lord to
act for the sake of His great Name. May the destruction of His
temple, and the cutting off of the holy service, and the
misfortunes that have befallen us, not appear small in His
sight. May the words of the prophet be fulfilled: "And the
Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to His temple" (Mal.
iii. 1). We have nothing in our possession [concerning the
coming of the Messiah] except the prophecy of Daniel. May the
God of Israel hasten our redemption and gather together all our
exiled and scattered [brethren] in my lifetime, in thy
lifetime, and in the lifetime of the whole house of Israel, who
love His name.
The concluding phrases cast a shadow of doubt on the authenticity of
this epistle or, more correctly, of some parts of both epistles, which
more probably reflect the mournful Messianic temper of the sixteenth
century, when this correspondence was brought to light by Spanish exiles
who had made their way to Constantinople, than the state of mind of a
Spanish dignitary or a Khazar king of the tenth century. However, the
essential data contained in Joseph's epistle are so completely in accord
with the reports of contemporaneous Arabic writers that the substance of
this correspondence may be safely declared to be authentic.[14]
Joseph's epistle must have arrived in Spain about 960. Only a few years
later events occurred which made this King the last ruler of the
Khazars. The apprehensions, voiced in his letter, concerning the
Russians, with whom the King was at war, and who were ready to "destroy
the whole land of the Ishmaelites as far as Bagdad," were speedily
realized. A few years later the Slavonian tribes, who had in the
meantime been united under the leadership of Russian princes, not only
threw off the yoke of the Khazars, whose vassals they were, but also
succeeded in invading and finally destroying their center at the mouth
of the Volga. Prince Svyatoslav of Kiev devastated the Khazar
territories on the Ityl, and, penetrating to the heart of the country,
dislodged the Khazars from the Caspian region (966-969). The Khazars
withdrew to their possessions on the Black Sea, and established
themselves in particular on the Crimean Peninsula, which for a long time
retained the name of Khazaria.
The greatly reduced Khazar kingdom in Tauris, the survival of a mighty
empire, was able to hold its own for nearly half a century, until in the
eleventh century it fell a prey to the Russians and Byzantines (1016).
The relatives of the last khagan fled, according to tradition, to their
coreligionists in Spain. The Khazar nation was scattered, and was
subsequently lost among the other nations. The remnants of the Khazars
in the Crimea who professed Judaism were in all likelihood merged with
the native Jews, consisting partly of Rabbanites and partly of Karaites.
In this way the ancient Jewish settlements on the Crimean Peninsula
suddenly received a large increase. At the same time the influx of
Jewish immigrants, who, together with the Greeks, moved from Byzantium
towards the northern shores of the Black Sea, continued as theretofore,
the greater part of these immigrants consisting of Karaites, who were
found in large numbers in the Byzantine Empire. Even the subsequent
dominion of the Pechenegs and Polovtzis, who ruled over the Tauris
region after the downfall of the Khazars, failed to uproot the ancient
traditions, and as late as the twelfth century the name Khazaria meets
us in contemporary documents. About the year 1175 the traveler Pethahiah
of Ratisbon visited "the land of the Kedars and that of the Khazars,
which are separated from each other by a sea tongue," meaning the
continental part of Tauris, where the nomadic Polovtzis (Kedars) were
roaming about, and the Crimean Peninsula, between which two regions lie
the Gulf of Perekop and the isthmus of the same name. In the land of the
Kedars Pethahiah did not find genuine Jews, but _minim_, heretics or
sectarians, who "do not believe in the traditions of the sages, eat
their Sabbath meal in the dark, are ignorant of the Talmudic forms of
the benedictions and prayers, and have not even heard of the Talmud." It
is evident that the author is describing the Karaites.
3. THE JEWS IN THE EARLY RUSSIAN PRINCIPALITIES AND IN THE TATARIC
KHANATE OF THE CRIMEA[15]
With the growth of the Russian Principality of Kiev, which received its
ecclesiastic organization from the hands of Byzantine monks, it
gradually became another objective of Jewish immigration. The Jews came
thither not only from Khazaria, or the Crimea, but also, following in
the wake of the Greeks, from the Empire of Byzantium, developing the
commercial life of the principality and connecting that primitive region
with the centers of human civilization. The popular legend, which is
reproduced in the ancient Russian chronicles, and is no doubt tinged
with the spirit of Byzantine clericalism, makes the Jews participate in
the competition of religions for the conquest of pagan Russia, in that
famous spectacle of the "test of creeds" which took place in 986 in the
presence of Vladimir, Prince of Kiev.
The church legend narrates that when Vladimir had announced his
intention to abandon idolatry, he received a visit from
Khazarian Jews, who said to him: "We have heard that the
Christians have come to preach their faith, but they believe in
one who was crucified by us, while we believe in the one God,
the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." Vladimir asked the Jews:
"What does your law prescribe?" To this they replied: "To be
circumcised, not to eat pork or game, and to keep the Sabbath."
"Where is your country?" inquired the Prince. "In Jerusalem,"
replied the Jews. "But do you live there?" he asked. "We do
not," answered the Jews, "for the Lord was wroth with our
forefathers, and scattered us all over the earth for our sins,
while our land was given away to the Christians." Thereupon
Vladimir exclaimed: "How then dare you teach others when you
yourselves are rejected by God and scattered? If God loved you,
you would not be dispersed in strange lands. Do you intend to
inflict the same misfortune on me?"
This popular tradition is historically true only insofar as it reflects
the ecclesiastic and political struggle of the time. It was in Taurian
Chersonesus, the ancient scene of Jewish and Byzantine rivalry, that the
threads were woven which subsequently tied pagan Russia to Byzantium.
The attempts of the Taurian, or Khazarian, Jews to assert their claims
in the religious competition at Kiev were bound to prove a failure. For
community of political and economic interests was forcing Byzantium and
the Principality of Kiev into an alliance, which was finally consummated
at the end of the tenth century by the conversion of Russia to Greek
Orthodox Christianity. The alliance resulted in the downfall of their
common enemy, the Khazars, who, for several centuries, had been
struggling with the Byzantines on the shores of the Black Sea, and at
the same time had held in subjection the tribes of the Slavs. In
consequence of the defeat of the Khazars, a part of the Jewish-Khazarian
center in Tauris was transferred to the Principality of Kiev.
The coincidence of the settlement of Jews in Kiev with the conversion of
Russia to the Greek Orthodox faith foreshadows the course of history.
The very earliest phase of Russian cultural life is stamped by the
Byzantine spirit of intolerance in relation to the Jews. The Abbot of
the famous Pechera monastery, Theodosius (1057-1074), taught the
Kiovians to live at peace with friends and foes, "but with their own
foes, not with those of God." God's foes, however, are Jews and
heretics, "who hold a crooked religion." In the Life of Theodosius
written by the celebrated Russian chronicler Nestor we are told that
this austere monk was in the habit of getting up in the night and
secretly going to the Jews to argue with them about Christ. He would
scold them, branding them as wicked and godless, and would purposely
irritate them, in the hope of being killed "for the profession of
Christ" and thus attaining to martyrdom, though it would seem that the
Jews consistently refused to grant him this pleasure. Hatred against
Jews and Judaism was equally preached by Theodosius' contemporaries
Illarion and John, Metropolitans of Kiev (about 1050 and 1080).
This propaganda of religious intolerance did not remain without effect.
In the beginning of the twelfth century the Jewish colony of Kiev
experienced the first pogrom. Under Grand Duke Svyatopolk II.
(1093-1113) the Jews of Kiev had enjoyed complete liberty of trade and
commerce. The Prince had protected his Jewish subjects, and had
intrusted some of them with the collection of the customs and other
ducal imposts. But during the interregnum following the death of
Svyatopolk (1113) they had to pay dearly for the liberty enjoyed by
them. The Kiovians had offered the throne of the principality to
Vladimir Monomakh, but he was slow about entering the capital. As a
result, riots broke out. The Kiev mob revolted, and, after looting the
residences of several high officials, threw itself upon the Jews and
plundered their property. The well-intentioned among the inhabitants of
Kiev dispatched a second delegation to Monomakh, warning him that, if he
tarried longer, the riots would assume formidable dimensions. Thereupon
Monomakh arrived and restored order in the capital.
Nevertheless the Jews continued to reside in Kiev. In 1124 they suffered
severely from a fire which destroyed a considerable portion of the city.
In the chronicles of that period (1146-1151) mention is frequently made
of the "Jewish gate" in Kiev. Jewish merchants were attracted towards
this city, a growing commercial center serving as the connecting link
between Western Europe on the one hand and the Black Sea provinces and
the Asiatic continent on the other. Reference to Kiev is made by the
Jewish travelers of the time, Benjamin of Tudela and Pethahiah of
Ratisbon (1160-1190). The former speaks of "the kingdom of Russia,
stretching from the gates of Prague to the gates of Kiev, a large city
on the border of the kingdom." The latter, Pethahiah, informs us that,
on leaving his home in Ratisbon, he proceeded to Prague, the capital of
Bohemia; from Prague he went to Poland, and from there "to Kiev, which
is in Russia," whereupon he traveled for six days, until he reached the
Dnieper, and, having crossed it, finally arrived on the coast of the
Black Sea and in the Crimea.
After the Crusades, when considerable settlements of Jewish immigrants
from Germany began to spring up in Poland, part of these immigrants
found their way into the Principality of Kiev. The German rabbis of the
twelfth century occasionally refer in their writings to the journeys of
German Jews traveling with their merchandise to "Russ" and "Sclavonia"
(= Slavonia, Slav countries). The Jews of Russia, who lacked rabbinical
authorities of their own, addressed their inquiries to the Jewish
scholars of Germany, or sent their studious young men to the West to
obtain a Talmudic education. Hebrew sources of the twelfth century make
mention of the names of Rabbi Isaac of Chernigov and Rabbi Moses of
Kiev. The latter is quoted as having addressed an inquiry to the
well-known Gaon of Bagdad, Samuel ben Ali.
The conquest of the Crimea by the Tatar khans in the thirteenth century
and the gradual extension of their sovereignty to the Principalities of
Kiev and Moscow brought the old center of Judaism in the Tauris region
in close contact with its offshoots in various parts of Russia. Kiev
enters into regular commercial intercourse with Kaffa (Theodosia) on the
Crimean sea-shore. Kaffa becomes during that period an international
emporium, owing to the Genoese, who had obtained from the Tatar khans
concessions for Kaffa and the surrounding country, and had founded there
a commercial colony of the Genoese Republic. The Crimean Peninsula was
joined to the world commerce of Italy, and merchantmen were constantly
ploughing the seas between Genoa and Kaffa, passing through the
Byzantine Dardanelles. Italians, Greeks, Jews, and Armenians flocked to
Kaffa and the adjacent localities on the southern coast of the Crimea.
The Government of the Genoese Republic time and again instructed its
consuls who were charged with the administration of the Crimean colony
to observe the principles of religious toleration in their attitude
towards this heterogeneous population. If the testimony of the traveler
Schiltberger, who visited the Crimea between 1394 and 1427, may be
relied upon, there were in Kaffa Jews "of two kinds," evidently
Rabbanites and Karaites, who had two synagogues and four thousand
houses, an imposing population to judge by its numbers.
The great crisis in the history of Byzantium--the capture of
Constantinople by the Turks--affected also the Genoese colony in the
Crimea. The Turks began to hamper the Genoese in their navigation
through the straits. In 1455 the Genoese Government ceded its Kaffa
possessions to the Bank of St. George in Genoa. The new administration
set out to restore order in the colony and establish normal relations
between the various races inhabiting it; but the days of this cultural
oasis on the Black Sea were numbered. In 1475 Kaffa was taken by the
Turks, and the whole peninsula fell under Turco-Tataric dominion.
Important Jewish communities were to be found during that period also in
the older Tataric possessions of the Crimea. Two Jewish communities, one
consisting of Rabbanites and the other of Karaites, flourished, during
the thirteenth century, in the ancient capital of the Tatar khans, named
Solkhat (now Eski-Krym). Beginning with 1428, the old Karaite community
of Chufut-Kale ("the Rock of the Jews"), situated near the new Tatar
capital, Bakhchi-Sarai, grows in numbers and influence. The memory of
this community is perpetuated by a huge number of tombstones, ranging
from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century. Crimea, now peopled with
Jews, sends forth settlers to Lithuania, where, at the end of the
fourteenth century, Grand Duke Vitovt[16] takes them under his
protection. Crimean colonies spring up in the Lithuanian towns of Troki
and Lutzk, which, as will be seen later, are granted extensive
privileges by the ruler of the land.
The establishment of Turkish sovereignty over the Crimea (1475-1783)
resulted in a closer commercial relationship between the Jewish center
on the Peninsula and the Principality of Moscow, which at that time
fenced herself off from the outside world by a Chinese wall, and, with
few exceptions, barred from her dominions all foreigners and infidels,
or "Basurmans."[17] In the second half of the fifteenth century the
Grand Duke of Muscovy, Ivan III., was constrained to seek the help of
several Crimean Jews in his diplomatic negotiations with the Khan of the
Crimea, Mengli-Guiray. One of the agents of the Muscovite Prince was an
influential Jew of Kaffa, by the name of Khoza Kokos, who was
instrumental in bringing about a military alliance between the Grand
Duke and the Khan (1472-1475). It is curious to note that Kokos wrote
his letters to Ivan III. in Hebrew, so that the Muscovite ruler, who
evidently could find no one in Moscow familiar with that language, had
to request his agent to correspond with him in Russian or "in the
Basurman language" (Tataric or perhaps Italian). Another agent of Ivan
III., Zechariah Guizolfi, was an Italian Jew, who had previously
occupied an important post in the Genoese colony in the Crimea, and was
the owner of the Taman Peninsula ("the Prince of Taman"). He stood in
close relations to Khan Mengli-Guiray, and in this capacity carried on a
diplomatic correspondence with the Prince of Muscovy (1484-1500). Later
on Zechariah was on the point of taking up his abode in Moscow in order
to participate more directly in the foreign affairs of Russia, but
circumstances interfered with the execution of the plan.
During the same period there arose in Moscow, as the result of a secret
propaganda of Judaism, a religious movement known under the name of the
"Judaizing heresy." According to the Russian chroniclers, the originator
of this heresy was the learned Jew Skharia (Zechariah), who had
emigrated with a number of coreligionists from Kiev to the ancient
Russian city of Novgorod. Profiting by the religious unrest rife at that
time in Novgorod--a new sect, called the Strigolniki,[18] had arisen in
the city, which abrogated the Church rites, and went to the point of
denying the divinity of Christ--Zechariah got in touch with several
representatives of the Orthodox clergy, and succeeded in converting them
to Judaism. The leaders of the Novgorod apostates, the priests Denis and
Alexius, went to Moscow in 1480, and converted a number of the Greek
Orthodox there, some of the new converts even submitting to the rite of
circumcision. The "Judaizing heresy" was soon intrenched among the
nobility of Moscow and in the court circles. Among its sympathizers was
the daughter-in-law of the Grand Duke, Helena.
The Archbishop of Novgorod, Hennadius, called attention to the dangerous
propagation of the "Judaizing heresy," and made valiant efforts to
uproot it in his diocese. In Moscow the fight against the new doctrine
proved extremely difficult. But here too it was finally checked, owing
to the vigorous endeavors of Hennadius and other Orthodox zealots. By
the decision of the Church Council of 1504, supported by the orders of
Ivan III., the principal apostates were burned at the stake, while the
others were cast into prison or exiled to monasteries. As a result, the
"Judaizing heresy" ceased to exist.[19]
Another tragic occurrence in the same period affords a lurid
illustration of Muscovite superstition. At the court of Grand Duke Ivan
III. the post of physician was occupied by a learned Jew, Master Leon,
who had been invited from Venice. In the beginning of 1490 the eldest
son of the Grand Duke fell dangerously ill. Master Leon tried to cure
his patient by means of hot cupping-glasses and various medicaments.
Questioned by the Grand Duke whether his son had any chances of
recovery, the physician, in an unguarded moment, replied: "I shall not
fail to cure your son; otherwise you may put me to death!" On March 15,
1490, the patient died. When the forty days of mourning were over, Ivan
III. gave orders to cut off the head of the Jewish physician for his
failure to effect a cure. The execution was carried out publicly, on one
of the squares of Moscow.
In the eyes of the Muscovites both the learned theologian Skharia and
the physician Leon were adepts of the "black art," or magicians. The
"Judaizing heresy" instilled in them a superstitious fear of the Jews,
of whom they only knew by hearsay. As long as such ideas and manners
prevailed, the Jews could scarcely expect to be hospitably received in
the land of the Muscovites. No wonder then that for a long time the Jews
appear there, not in the capacity of permanent residents, but as
itinerant merchants, who in a few cases--and with extreme reluctance at
that--are accorded the right of temporary sojourn in "holy Russia."
FOOTNOTES:
[2] [Later on the author differentiates between Tauris and the Crimea,
using the former term to designate the northern coast of the Black Sea
in general, with the Crimea as a part of it. The modern Russian
Government of Tavrida is similarly made up of two sections: the larger
northern part consists of the mainland, the smaller southern part is
identical with the Crimean Peninsula, connected with the mainland by the
Isthmus of Perekop. In antiquity the name Tauri, or Taurians, was
restricted to the inhabitants of the mountainous south coast of the
Crimea.]
[3] The date is that of the "Bosporan era," and corresponds to the year
80-81 of the common era.
[4] In the Greek documents of that period Synagogue signifies, not a
house of worship, but a religious community.
[5] [It is possible that the identification was suggested by the
similarity in sound between Bosporus and _bi-Spharad_, the Hebrew for
"in Sepharad."]
[6] [The Arabic and other medieval authors write the name with a _kh_ (=
hard German _ch_), hence the frequent spelling Chazars. In Hebrew
sources the word is written with a _k_ (כ), except in a
recently discovered document (see Schechter, Jew. Quart. Review, new
series, iii. 184), where it is spelled with a _k_ (ק).
Besides _Khazar_ and _Kazar_, the name is also found in the form
_Kozar_, or _Kuzar_.]
[7] According to another version of the same story, quoted by the Arabic
geographer al-Bekri (d. 1094), the Bishop who was championing the cause
of Christianity said in reply to the King's inquiry: "I believe that
Jesus Christ, the son of Mary, is the Word, and that he revealed the
mysteries of the great and exalted God." A Jew who lived at the royal
court and was present at the disputation interrupted him with the
remark: "He [the Bishop] believes in things which are unintelligible to
me."
[8] [The author, evidently relying on the authority of Harkavy, writes
_Ibn Sharzi_. The writer referred to by Harkavy is Ali Ibn Ja`far
ash-Shaizari (wrongly called Ibn Sharzi), who made an extract from Ibn
Fakih's "Book of Countries" about 1022. This extract has since been
published by de Goeje in his _Bibliotheca Geographicorum Arabicorum_,
vol. v. Our reference is found there on p. 271. I have put Ibn Fakih's
name in the text, as there is no reason to doubt that our passage was
found in the original work, which was written more than a hundred years
earlier.]
[9] [See on the name of this city de Goeje's remarks in his edition of
Ibn Fakih, p. 271, note _a_.]
[10] A group of Slav nations.
[11] A group of Caucasian cities (Semender = Tarku, near
Shamir-Khan-Shur; Bab al-Abwab = Derbent).
[12] A group of Crimean cities (Kerch, Sudak, Mangup, and others).
[13] [_I. e._ Sea of Constantinople, another name for the Black Sea.]
[14] This supposition is confirmed by a recently discovered Genizah
fragment containing a portion of another Khazar epistle, which
supplements and modifies the epistle of King Joseph. See Schechter, "An
Unknown Khazar Document," Jewish Quarterly Review, new series, iii. 181
ff.
[15] [During the early centuries of its existence Russia was made up of
a number of independent principalities, over which the Principality of
Kiev, "the mother of Russian cities," exercised, or rather claimed, the
right of overlordship. From 1238 to 1462 the Russian lands were subject
to the dominion of the Tatars. During the fourteenth century, while yet
under Tatar rule, the Principality of Moscow gained the ascendancy over
the other Russian states. The absorption of the latter and the creation
of the autocratic Tzardom of Muscovy was the work of Ivan III.
(1462-1505), his son Basil (1505-1533), and his grandson Ivan IV. the
Terrible (1533-1584).]
[16] [Also written Witowt. Another form of the name is Witold.]
[17] [_Basurman_, or _Busurman_, mutilated from _Mussulman_, is an
archaic and contemptuous designation for Mohammedans and in general for
all who do not profess the Greek Orthodox faith.]
[18] [The name is derived from their founder, Carp Strigolnik.]
[19] [For later "Judaizing" tendencies in Russia, see pp. 251 _et seq._
and 401 _et seq._]
CHAPTER II
THE JEWISH COLONIES IN POLAND AND LITHUANIA
1. THE IMMIGRATION FROM WESTERN EUROPE DURING THE PERIOD OF THE CRUSADES
While the Jewish colonies on the shores of the Black Sea and on the
territory of modern South Russia were due to immigration from the lands
of the Greco-Byzantine and Mohammedan East, the Jewish settlements in
Poland were founded by new-comers from Western Europe, from the lands of
German culture and "the Latin faith."[20] This division was a natural
product of the historic development that made Slavonian Russia gravitate
towards the East, and Slavonian Poland turn towards the West. Even prior
to her joining the ecclesiastic organization of the West, Poland had
attained to prominence as a commercial colony of Germany. The Slav lands
on the banks of the Varta and Vistula, being nearest to Western Europe,
were bound to attract the Jews, at a very early period, in their
capacity as international traders. There is reason to believe that, as
far back as the ninth century, Jews living in the German provinces of
Charlemagne's Empire carried on commerce with the neighboring Slav
countries, and visited Poland with their merchandise. These ephemeral
visits frequently led to their permanent settlement in those strange
lands.
Information concerning the Jews of pre-Christian Poland has come down to
us in the shape of hazy legends. One of these legends narrates that,
after the death of Prince Popiel, about the middle of the ninth century,
the Poles assembled in Krushvitza, their ancient capital, to choose a
successor to the dead sovereign. After prolonged disputes concerning the
person to be elected, it was finally agreed that the first man found
entering the town the following morning should be chosen as the ruler.
It so happened that on the following morning the first to enter the town
was the Jew Abraham Prokhovnik.[21] He was seized and proclaimed prince,
but he declined the honor, urging that it be accorded to a wise Pole by
the name of Piast, who thus became the progenitor of the Piast dynasty.
Another legend has it that at the end of the ninth century a Jewish
delegation from Germany waited upon the Polish Prince Leshek, to plead
for the admission of Jews into Poland. Leshek subjected the delegates to
a protracted cross-examination concerning the principles of the Jewish
religion and Jewish morality, and finally complied with their request.
Thereupon large numbers of German Jews began to arrive in Poland, and,
in 905, they obtained special written privileges, which, according to
the same legend, were subsequently lost. These obscure tales, though
lacking all foundation in fact, and undoubtedly invented in much later
times, contain a grain of historic truth, in that they indicate the
existence of Jewish settlements in pagan Poland, and point to their
German origin.
The propagation of Latin Christianity in Poland (beginning with 966),
which placed the country under the control not only of the emperors of
Germany but also of its bishops as the representatives of the Roman See,
was bound to stimulate the intercourse between the two countries and
result in an increased influx of Jewish merchants and settlers. However,
this slow commercial colonization would scarcely have assumed any
considerable dimensions, had not exceptional circumstances forced a
large number of Jews to seek refuge in Poland. A compulsory immigration
of this kind began after the first Crusade, in 1096. It started in
near-by Slavonian Bohemia, where the Crusaders attacked the Jews of
Prague, and converted them forcibly to Christianity. The Bohemian Jews
made up their minds to flee to neighboring Poland, which had not yet
been reached by the devastating Christian hosts. The Bohemian Prince
Vratislav robbed the immigrants on the way, but even this could not
prevent many of them from leaving the country in which both people and
Government were hostile to them (1098).
Beginning with this period there was a steady flow of Jews from the
Rhine and Danube provinces into Poland, increasing in volume as a result
of the Crusades (1146-1147 and 1196) and the severe Jewish persecutions
in Germany. The accentuation of Jewish suffering in Germany during the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the royal power was incapable of
shielding its _Kammerknechte_ against the fury of the fanatical mob or
the degrading canons of the Church, drove vast numbers of Jews into
Poland. Here the refugees sought shelter in the provinces nearest to the
Austro-German border, Cracow, Posen, Kalish, and Silesia.
The first signs of discord between Christians and Jews are to be noticed
in the second half of the twelfth century, when Poland fell asunder into
several feudal Principalities, or "Appanages."[22] The Prince of Great
Poland, Mechislav III., the Old, in his desire to enforce law and order,
found it necessary to issue, in 1173, strict injunctions forbidding all
kinds of violence against the Jews and in particular the attacks upon
them by Christian "scholars," the pupils of the ecclesiastic and
monastic colleges. Those found guilty of such attacks were to be heavily
fined. On the whole, the rulers were willing to take the Jews under
their protection. Under Mechislav the Old, Casimir the Just, and Leshek
the White, who reigned at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of
the thirteenth century, the Jews farmed and administered the mint of
Great and of Little Poland. On the coins struck by these Jews, many of
which have come down to us, the names of the ruling princes are marked
in Hebrew characters.[23] At the very beginning of the thirteenth
century (1203-1207) we hear of Jews owning lands and estates in Polish
Silesia.
Such was the rise and growth of the Jewish colonies in Poland. As time
went on, the commercial intercourse between these colonies and the West
led to a spiritual relationship between them and the centers of Jewish
culture in Europe. A contemporary Bohemian scholar of the Tosafist
school, Rabbi Eliezer, informs us that the Jews of Poland, Russia, and
Hungary, having no scholars of their own, invited their spiritual
leaders from other countries, probably from Germany. These foreign
scholars occupied the posts of rabbis, cantors, and school teachers
among them, and were remunerated for their services. At the same time
studious Polish Jews were in the habit of going abroad to perfect
themselves in the sciences, as was also the case with the Jewish
settlers in Russia. From the German mother country the Polish Jews
received not only their language, a German dialect, which subsequently
developed into the Polish-Jewish jargon, or Yiddish, but also their
religious culture and their communal organization. All this, however,
was in an embryonic stage, and only gradually unfolded in the following
period.
2. THE CHARTER OF PRINCE BOLESLAV AND THE CANONS OF THE CHURCH
The importance of Jewish immigration for the economic development of
Poland was first realized by the feudal Polish princes of the thirteenth
century. Prompted by the desire of cultivating industrial activities in
their dominions, these princes gladly welcomed settlers from Germany,
without making a distinction between Jews and Christians. Nor did the
native Slav population suffer inconvenience from this immigration,
which, on the contrary, brought the first elements of a higher
civilization into the country. In a land which had not yet emerged from
the primitive stage of agricultural economy, and possessed only two
fixed classes, owners of the soil and tillers of the soil, the Jews
naturally represented the "third estate," acting as the pioneers of
trade and finance. They put their capital in circulation, by launching
industrial undertakings, by leasing estates, and farming various
articles of revenue (salt mines, customs duties), and by engaging in
money-lending. The native population, which medieval culture, with its
religious intolerance and class prejudice, had not yet had time to
"train" properly, lived at peace with the Jews.
The influence of the Church, on the one hand, and that of adjacent
Christian Germany, on the other, slowly undermined this patriarchal
order of things. The popes dispatched their legates to Poland to see to
it that the well-known canonical statutes, which were permeated with
implacable hatred against the adherents of Judaism, did not remain a
dead letter, but were carried out in practice. During the same period
the Polish princes, in particular Boleslav the Shy (1247-1279),
endeavored to draw German emigrants into Poland, by bestowing upon them
considerable privileges and the right of self-government, the so-called
"Magdeburg Law," or _ius teutonicum_.[24] The Germans, while settling in
the Polish cities as merchants and tradesmen,[25] and thus becoming the
competitors of the Jews, imported from their native land into the new
environment the spirit of economic class strife and denominational
antagonism. The best of the Polish rulers were forced to combat the
effects of this foreign importation, and found it necessary to encourage
the economic activity of the Jews for the benefit of the country and to
shield them against the insults of their Christian neighbors.
Boleslav of Kalish, surnamed the Pious, who ruled over the territory of
Great Poland, was a prince of this kind. In 1264, with the consent of
the highest dignitaries of the state, he promulgated a statute defining
the rights of the Jews within his dominions. This charter of privileges,
closely resembling in its contents the statutes of Frederick of Austria
and Ottocar of Bohemia, became the corner-stone of Polish-Jewish
legislation. Boleslav's charter consists of thirty-seven paragraphs, and
begins with these words:
The deeds of man, when unconfirmed by the voice of witnesses or
by written documents, are bound to pass away swiftly and
disappear from memory. Because of this, we, Boleslav, Prince of
Great Poland, make it known to our contemporaries as well as to
our descendants, to whom this writing shall come down, that the
Jews, who have established themselves over the length and
breadth of our country, have received from us the following
statutes and privileges.
The first clause of the charter prescribes that, when civil and criminal
cases are tried in court, the testimony of a Christian against a Jew is
to be accepted only if confirmed by the deposition of a Jewish witness.
The following clauses (§§2-7) determine the process of law in litigation
between Christians and Jews, involving primarily pawnbroking; the rules
prescribed there protect equally the interests of the Jewish creditor
and the Christian debtor. Lawsuits between Jew and Jew do not fall
within the jurisdiction of the general municipal courts, but are tried
either by the prince himself or by his lord lieutenant, the
voyevoda[26], or the special judge appointed by the latter (§8). The
Christian who has murdered or wounded a Jew answers for his crime before
the princely court: in the former case the culprit incurs "due
punishment," and his property is forfeit to the prince; in the latter
case he has to satisfy the plaintiff, and must in addition pay a fine
into the princely exchequer (§§9-10).
This is followed by a set of paragraphs which guarantee to the Jew the
inviolability of his person and property. They forbid annoying Jewish
merchants on the road, exacting from them higher customs duties than
from Christians, demolishing Jewish cemeteries, and attacking synagogues
or "schools" (§§12-15). In case of a nocturnal assault upon the home of
a Jew, the Christian neighbors are obliged to come to his rescue as soon
as they hear his cries; those who fail to respond are subject to a fine
(§36).
The rights and functions of the "Jewish judge,"[27] who is appointed to
try cases between Jew and Jew, sitting "in the neighborhood of the
synagogue or in some other place," are set forth elaborately (§§16-23).
The kidnaping of Jewish children with the view of baptizing them is
severely punished (§27). The charter further prohibits charging the Jews
with the use of Christian blood for ritual purposes, in view of the fact
that the groundlessness of such charges had been demonstrated by papal
bulls. Should nevertheless such charges be raised, they must be
corroborated by six witnesses, three Christians and three Jews. If the
charges are substantiated, the guilty Jew loses his life; otherwise the
same fate overtakes the Christian informer (§32). All these legal
safeguards were, in the words of the charter, to remain in force "for
all time."
The Polish lawgiver was evidently anxious to secure for the Jews such
conditions of life as might enable them to benefit the country by their
commercial activity, while enjoying liberty of conscience and living in
harmony with the non-Jewish population. Boleslav's enactment expresses,
not the individual will of the ruler, but the collective decision of the
highest dignitaries and the representatives of the estates, who, as is
pointed out in the document, had been previously consulted.
Thus the temporal powers of the state, guided by the economic needs of
the country, endeavored to establish Jewish life in Poland on more or
less rational civic foundations. The ecclesiastic authorities, however,
inspired rather by the cosmopolitan ideals of the Roman Church than by
love of their native land, strained all their energies to detach the
Jews from the general life of the country. They segregated them from the
Christian population because of their alleged injuriousness to the
Catholic faith, and reduced them to the position of a despised caste.
The well-known Church Council of Breslau, convened in 1266 by the Papal
Legate Guido, had the special mission of introducing in the oldest
Polish diocese, that of Gnesen, the canonical laws, including those
applying to the Jews. The motives by which this legislation was
prompted are frankly stated in the preamble to the section of the
Breslau "constitution" which deals with the Jews:
In view of the fact--runs clause 12--that Poland is a new
plantation on the soil of Christianity (_quum adhuc terra
Polonica sit in corpore Christianitatis nova plantatio_), there
is reason to fear that her Christian population will fall an
easy prey to the influence of the superstitions and evil habits
of the Jews living among them, the more so as the Christian
religion took root in the hearts of the faithful of these
countries at a later date and in a more feeble manner. For this
reason we most strictly enjoin that the Jews residing in the
diocese of Gnesen shall not live side by side with the
Christians, but shall live apart, in houses adjoining each other
or connected with one another, in some section of the city or
village. The section inhabited by Jews shall be separated from
the general dwelling-place of the Christians by a hedge, wall,
or ditch.
The Jews owning houses in the Christian quarter shall be compelled to
sell them within the shortest term possible.
Further injunctions prescribe that the Jews shall lock themselves up in
their houses while church processions are marching through the streets;
that in each city they shall possess no more than one synagogue; that,
"in order to be marked off from the Christians," they shall wear a
peculiarly shaped hat, with a horn-like shield (_cornutum pileum_), and
that any Jew showing himself on the street without this headgear shall
be subject to punishment, in accordance with the custom of the country.
The Christians are forbidden, under penalty of excommunication, to
invite Jews to a meal, or to eat and drink with them, or dance and make
merry with them at weddings and other celebrations. The Christians are
barred from buying meat and other eatables from Jews, since the sellers
might treacherously put poison in them.
These prohibitions are followed by the ancient canonical enactments
forbidding the Jews to keep Christian servants, nursery-maids, and
wet-nurses, and barring them from collecting customs duties and
exercising any other public function. A Jew living unlawfully with a
Christian woman is liable to imprisonment and fine, while the woman is
subject to a public whipping and to banishment from the town for all
time.
The Church Council which held its sessions in Buda (Ofen), in Hungary,
in 1279, was attended by the highest ecclesiastic dignitaries of Poland.
This Council ratified the clause concerning the "Jewish sign,"
supplementing it by the following details: The Jews of both sexes shall
be obliged to wear a ring of red cloth sewed on to their upper garment,
on the left side of the chest. The Jew appearing on the street without
this sign shall be accounted a vagrant, and no Christian shall have the
right to do business with him. A similar sign, only of saffron color, is
prescribed for "Saracens and Ishmaelites," _i. e._ for Mohammedans. The
law barring Jews from the collection of customs and the discharge of
other public functions is extended by the Synod of Buda to the
"sectarians," to the Christians of the Greek Orthodox persuasion.
In this manner the condition of the Jews of Poland in the thirteenth
century was determined by two factors operating in different directions:
the temporal powers, actuated by economic considerations, accorded the
Jews the elementary rights of citizenship, while the ecclesiastic
powers, prompted by religious intolerance, endeavored to exclude the
Jews from civil life. As long as patriarchal conditions of life
prevailed, and Catholicism in Poland had not yet assumed complete
control over the country, the policy of the Church was powerless to
inflict serious damage upon the Jews. They lived in safety, under the
protection of the Polish princes, and, except for the German immigrants,
managed to get along peaceably with the Christian population. But the
clerical party was looking out for the future, taking assiduous care
that "the new plantation on the soil of Christianity" should develop
along the lines of the older plantations, and was scattering the seeds
of religious hatred in the patient expectation of a plentiful harvest.
3. RISE OF POLISH JEWRY UNDER CASIMIR THE GREAT
The Jewish emigration from Western Europe assumed especially large
proportions in the first part of the fourteenth century. The butcheries
perpetrated by the hordes of Rindfleisch and Armleder, and the massacres
accompanying the Black Death, forced a large number of German Jews to
seek shelter in Poland, which was then undergoing the process of
unification and rejuvenation. In 1319, King Vladislav[28] Lokietek[29]
laid the foundation for the political unity of Poland by abolishing the
former feudal divisions, and his famous son Casimir the Great
(1333-1370) was indefatigable in his endeavors to raise the level of
civil and economic life in his united realm. Casimir the Great founded
new cities and fortified old ones, promoted commerce and industry, and
protected, with equal solicitude, the interests of all classes, not
excluding those of the peasants. He was styled the "peasant king," and
the popular commendation of his efforts in the upbuilding of the cities
was crystallized in the saying that Casimir the Great "found a Poland of
wood and left behind him a Poland of stone."
A ruler of this type could not but welcome the useful industrial
activity of the Jews with the liveliest satisfaction. He was anxious to
bring them in close contact with the Christian population on the common
ground of peaceful labor and mutual helpfulness. He was equally quick to
appreciate the advantages which the none too flourishing royal exchequer
might derive from the experience of Jewish capitalists. Such must have
been the motives which actuated Casimir when, in the second year of his
reign (1344), he ratified, in Cracow, the charter which Boleslav of
Kalish had granted to the Jews of Great Poland, and which he now
extended in its operation to all the provinces of the kingdom.
On later occasions (1346-1370) Casimir amplified the charter of Boleslav
by adding new enactments. In view of the hostility of the municipalities
and the clergy towards the Jews, the King found it necessary to insist
in particular on placing Jewish legal cases under his own jurisdiction,
and taking them out of the hands of the municipal and ecclesiastic
authorities. The Jews were granted the following privileges: the right
of free transit through the whole country, of residing in the cities,
towns, and villages, of renting and mortgaging the estates of the
nobility, and lending money at a fixed rate of interest, the last
pursuit being closed to Christians by virtue of canonical restrictions,
and therefore left entirely in the hands of the Jews. The Polish
lawgiver was equally solicitous about enforcing respect for the Jew as a
human being and drawing him nearer to the Christian in private life, in
violent contradiction with the tendency of the Church to isolate the
infidels from the "flock of the faithful." "If the Jew," runs one of
the clauses of Casimir's charter, "enters the house of a Christian, no
one has a right to cause him any injury or unpleasantness. Every Jew is
allowed to visit the municipal baths in safety, in the same way as the
Christians,[30] and pay the same fee as the Christians."
Casimir was equally interested in ordering the inner life of the Jews.
The "Jewish judge," a Christian official appointed by the king to try
Jewish cases, was enjoined to dispense justice in the synagogue or some
other place, in accordance with the wishes of the representatives of the
Jewish community. The rôle of process-server was assigned to the
"schoolman," _i. e._ the synagogue beadle. This was the germ of the
future system of Kahal autonomy.
It seems that in the fateful year of the Black Death (1348-1349) the
Polish Jews too were in great danger. On the wings of the plague, which
penetrated from Germany to Poland, came the hideous rumor charging the
Jews with having poisoned the wells. If we are to trust the testimony of
an Italian chronicler, Matteo Villani, some ten thousand Jews in the
Polish cities bordering on Germany met their fate in 1348 at the hands
of Christian mobs, even the King being powerless to shield the
unfortunates against the fury of the people. A vague account in an old
Polish chronicle relates that in the year 1349 the Jews were
exterminated "in nearly the whole of Poland." It is possible that
attacks on the Jews took place in the border towns, but, judging by the
fact that the Jewish chroniclers, in describing the ravages of the Black
Death, make no mention of Poland, these attacks cannot have been
extensive. Be this as it may, there can be no doubt that, threatened
with massacres in Germany, large numbers of Jews fled to the neighboring
towns of Poland, and subsequently settled there.
It may be mentioned in this connection that from about the same time
dates the origin of the Jewish community of Lvov (Lemberg),[31] the
capital of Red Russia, or Galicia, which had been added to his dominions
by Casimir the Great.[32] In 1356 Casimir, in granting the Magdeburg Law
to the city of Lemberg, bestowed upon the local Jews the right "of being
judged according to their own laws," _i. e._ autonomy in their communal
affairs, a privilege accorded at the same time to the Ruthenians,
Armenians, and Tatars.
Casimir the Great's attitude towards the Jews was thus a part of his
general policy with reference to foreign settlers, whom he believed to
be useful for the development of the country. This, however, did not
prevent certain evil-minded persons, both then and in later ages, from
seeing in these acts of rational statesmanship the manifestation of the
King's personal predilections and attachments. Rumor had it that Casimir
was favorably disposed towards the Jews because of his infatuation with
the beautiful Jewess Estherka. This Jewish belle, the daughter of a
tailor, is supposed to have captured the heart of the King so completely
that in 1356 he abandoned a former favorite for her sake. Estherka lived
in the royal palace of Lobzovo, near Cracow. She bore the King two
daughters, who were brought up by their mother in the Jewish religion,
and two sons, who were educated as Christians, and who subsequently
became the progenitors of several noble families. Estherka was killed
during the persecution to which the Jews were subjected by Casimir's
successor, Louis of Hungary. The whole romantic episode presents a
mixture of fact and fiction in which it is difficult to make out the
truth.
Similarly blurred reports have come down to us concerning the
persecutions by the new ruler, Louis of Hungary (1370-1382). During the
reign of this King, when, as the Polish historians put it, justice had
vanished, the law kept silent, and the people complained bitterly about
the despotism of the judges and officials, an attempt was made to rob
the Jews of the protection of the law. Nursed as he was in the Catholic
traditions of Western Europe, Louis persecuted the Jews from religious
motives, threatening with expulsion those among them who had refused to
embrace the Christian faith. Fortunately for the Jews his reign in
Poland was too ephemeral and unpopular to undo the work of his famous
predecessor, the last king of the Piast dynasty. Only at a later date,
during the protracted reign of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Yaghello, who
acquired the Polish crown by marrying, in 1386, Louis' daughter Yadviga,
did the Church obtain power over the affairs of the state, gradually
undermining the civil status of the Jews of Poland.
4. POLISH JEWRY DURING THE REIGN OF YAGHELLO
With the outgoing fourteenth century, Poland was drawn more and more
into the whirlpool of European politics. Catholicism served as the
connecting link between this Slav country and Western Europe. Hence the
influence of the West manifested itself primarily in the enhancement of
ecclesiastic authority, which, being cosmopolitan in character,
endeavored to obliterate all national and cultural distinctions. The
Polish king Vladislav Yaghello (1386-1434), having been converted from
paganism to Catholicism, and having forced his Lithuanian subjects to
follow his example, adhered to the new faith with the ardor of a
convert, and frequently yielded to the influence of the clergy. It was
during his reign that the Jews of Poland suffered their first religious
persecution in that country.
The Jews of Posen were charged with having bribed a poor Christian woman
into stealing from the local Dominican church three hosts, which
supposedly were stabbed and thrown into a pit. From the pierced hosts,
so the superstitious rumor had it, blood spurted forth, in confirmation
of the Eucharist dogma. Nor was this the only miracle which popular
imagination ascribed to the three bits of holy bread. The Archbishop of
Posen, having learned of the alleged blasphemy, instituted proceedings
against the Jews. The Rabbi of Posen, thirteen elders of the Jewish
community, and the woman charged with the theft of the holy wafers,
became the victims of popular superstition; after prolonged tortures
they were all tied to pillars, and roasted alive on a slow fire (1399).
Moreover, the Jews of Posen were punished by the imposition of an
"eternal" fine, which they had to pay annually in favor of the Dominican
church. This fine was rigorously exacted down to the eighteenth century,
as long as the legend of the three hosts lingered in the memory of pious
Catholics.
As in the West, religious motives in such cases merely served as a
disguise to cover up motives of an economic nature--envy on the part of
the Christian city-dwellers of the prosperity of the Jews, who had
managed to obtain a foothold in certain branches of commerce, and
eagerness to dispose in one way or another of inconvenient rivals.
Similar motives, coupled with religious intolerance, were responsible
for the anti-Jewish riots in Cracow in 1407. In that ancient capital of
Poland the Jews had increased in numbers in the beginning of the
fourteenth century, and, by their commercial enterprise, had attained to
prosperity. The Cracow burghers were jealous of them, and the clergy
found it improper that the doomed sons of the Synagogue should live so
tranquilly under the shelter of the benevolent Church. A silent but
stubborn agitation was carried on against the Jews, their enemies merely
waiting for a convenient opportunity to square accounts with them.
On one occasion, on the third day of Easter, the priest Budek, who had
gained the reputation of an implacable Jew-baiter, delivered a sermon in
the Church of St. Barbara. As he was about to leave the pulpit, he
suddenly announced to the worshipers that he had found a notice on the
pulpit to this effect: "The Jews living in Cracow killed a Christian boy
last night, and made sport over his blood; moreover, they threw stones
at a priest who was going to visit a sick man, and was carrying a
crucifix in his hands." No sooner had these words been uttered than the
people rushed into the Jewish street, and began to loot the houses of
"Christ's enemies." The royal authorities hastened to the rescue of the
Jews, and by armed force put an end to the riots. But several hours
later, when the bells of the town hall began to ring, summoning the
members of the magistracy to a meeting, for the purpose of punishing the
instigators of the disorders, some one in the crowd shouted that the
magistracy was inviting the Christians to another attack upon the Jews.
Thereupon the rabble came running from all parts of the city and began
to slay and plunder the Jews, setting fire to their houses. Some Jews
sought refuge in the Tower of St. Anne, but the mob set fire to the
tower, and the unfortunate Jews had to surrender. A number of them, to
save their lives, adopted Christianity, while the children of the slain
were all baptized. Many Christians, according to the testimony of the
Polish historian Dlugosh[33], grew rich on the money plundered from the
Jews.
One cannot fail to perceive in all these catastrophes the influence of
neighboring Germany[34]. It was from Germany that the clerical reaction
which followed upon the struggle of the Church with the reformatory Huss
movement penetrated to Poland. The Synod of Constance, which condemned
Huss, was attended by the Archbishop of Gnesen, Nicholas Tromba, who
appeared at the head of a Polish delegation. On his return, this leading
dignitary of the Polish Church presided over the proceedings of the
Synod of Kalish (1420), which had also been convened in connection with
the Huss movement.
At the suggestion of this Archbishop, the Council of Kalish solemnly
ratified all the anti-Jewish enactments which had been passed by the
Councils of Breslau and Buda (Ofen),[35] but had seldom been carried out
in practice. These laws, as will be remembered, forbade all intercourse
between Jew and Christian, and ordered the Jews to live in separate
quarters, to wear a distinctive mark on the upper garment, and so forth.
At the same time the Jews were required to pay a tax in favor of the
churches of those diocesan districts "where they now live, and where by
right Christians ought to live," this tax to correspond to "the losses
inflicted by them upon the Christians." These injunctions were issued as
special instructions to the members of the clergy in all the dioceses.
The ecclesiastic tendencies gradually forced their way into secular
legislation. The fanatics of the Church exerted their influence not only
on the King but also on the landed nobility, the _Shlakhta_,[36] which
at that time began to take a more active interest in the affairs of the
state. At the convention of the Shlakhta in Varta[37] (1423) King
Vladislav Yaghello sanctioned a law forbidding the Jews to lend money
against written securities, only loans against pledges being permitted.
The ecclesiastic origin of this enactment is betrayed in the ugly manner
in which the law is justified in the preamble: "Whereas Jewish cunning
is always directed against the Christians and aims rather at the
property of the Christian than at his creed or person...."
5. THE JEWS OF LITHUANIA DURING THE REIGN OF VITOVT
An entirely different picture is presented at that time by Lithuania,
which, in spite of its dynastic alliance with Poland, retained complete
autonomy of administration. The patriarchal order of things, which was
nearing its end in Poland, was still firmly intrenched in the Duchy of
Lithuania, but recently emerged from the stage of primitive paganism.
Medieval culture had not yet taken hold of the inhabitants of the wooded
banks of the Niemen, and the Jews were able to settle there without
having to face violence and persecution.
It is difficult to determine the exact date of the first Jewish
settlements in Lithuania. So much is certain, however, that by the end
of the fourteenth century a number of important communities were in
existence, such as those of Brest, Grodno, Troki, Lutzk, and Vladimir,
the last two in Volhynia, which, prior to the Polish-Lithuanian Union of
1579, formed part of the Duchy. The first one to legalize the existence
of these communities was the Lithuanian Grand Duke Vitovt, who ruled
over Lithuania from 1388 to 1430, partly as an independent sovereign,
partly in the name of his cousin, the Polish King Yaghello. In 1388 the
Jews of Brest and other Lithuanian communities obtained from Vitovt a
charter similar in content to the statutes of Boleslav of Kalish and
Casimir the Great, and in 1389 even more extensive privileges were
bestowed by him on the Jews of Grodno.
In these enactments the Lithuanian ruler exhibits, like Casimir, an
enlightened solicitude for a peaceful relationship between Jews and
Christians and for the inner welfare of the Jewish communities. Under
the laws enacted by Vitovt the Jews of Lithuania formed a class of free
citizens, standing under the immediate protection of the Grand Duke and
his local administration. They lived in independent communities,
enjoying autonomy in their internal affairs as far as religion and
property are concerned, while in criminal affairs they were liable to
the court of the local starosta[38] or sub-starosta, and, in
particularly important cases, to the court of the Grand Duke himself.
The law guaranteed to the Jews inviolability of person and property,
liberty of religion, the right of free transit, the free pursuit of
commerce and trade, on equal terms with the Christians. The Lithuanian
Jews carried on business on the market-places or in shops, they plied
all kinds of trades, and occasionally engaged in agriculture. Men of
wealth lent money on interest, leased from the Grand Duke the customs
duties, the revenues on spirits, and other taxes. They held estates
either in their own right or in the form of land leases. The taxes which
they paid into the exchequer were adapted to the character of their
occupations, and on the whole were not burdensome. Aside from the
Rabbanite Jews there existed in Lithuania Karaites, who had immigrated
from the Crimea, and had established themselves in the regions of Troki
and Lutzk.
Accordingly the position of the Jews was more favorable in Lithuania
than in Poland. Jewish immigrants, on their way from Germany to Poland,
frequently went as far as Lithuania and settled there permanently.
Lithuania formed the extreme boundary in the eastward movement of the
Jews, Russia and Muscovy being almost entirely closed to them.
6. THE CONFLICT BETWEEN ROYALTY AND CLERGY UNDER CASIMIR IV. AND HIS
SONS
The conflict of tendencies in the Polish legislation concerning the Jews
manifested itself with particular violence in the reign of Casimir IV.,
the third king of the Yaghello dynasty. The attitude of Casimir IV.
(1447-1492), who was imbued with the ideas of the humanistic movement
then in vogue, was at first that of a wise ruler, the guardian of the
common interests of his subjects. As Grand Duke of Lithuania he had
followed the liberal Jewish policies of his predecessor Vitovt. He
protected the personal and communal rights of both the Rabbanite and
Karaite Jews--to the latter he granted, in 1441, the Magdeburg Law--and
he frequently availed himself of the services of enterprising Jewish
financiers and tax-farmers to increase the revenues of the state.
Having accepted the Polish crown, Casimir was resolved to rule
independently and to disregard the designs of the all-powerful clergy.
Shortly after his coronation, in August, 1447, while the King was on a
visit to Posen, the city was devastated by a terrible fire. During the
conflagration the ancient original of the charter which Casimir the
Great had bestowed upon the Jews was lost. A Jewish delegation from the
communities of Posen, Kalish, and other cities petitioned the King to
restore and ratify the old Jewish privileges, on the basis of copies of
the charter which had been spared. Casimir readily granted the request
of the deputies. "We desire"--he announces in his new charter--"that the
Jews, whom we wish to protect in our own interest as well as in the
interest of the royal exchequer, should feel comforted in our beneficent
reign." Corroborating as it did all the rights and privileges previously
conferred upon the Jews--liberty of residence and commerce, communal
and judicial autonomy, inviolability of life and liberty, protection
against groundless charges and attacks--the charter of Casimir IV. was a
direct protest against the canonical laws only recently reissued for
Poland by the Council of Kalish, and for the whole Catholic world by the
great Council at Basle. In opposition to the main trend of the Council
resolutions, the royal charter permitted the Jews to associate with
Christians, and exempted them from the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastic
law courts (1453).
The King's liberalism aroused the resentment of the Catholic clergy. The
leader of the clerical party was the energetic Archbishop of Cracow,
Cardinal Zbignyev Oleshnitzki, who openly headed the forces arrayed in
opposition to the King. He denounced Casimir bitterly for granting
protection to the Jews, "to the injury and insult of the holy faith."
Do not imagine--Oleshnitzki writes to the King in May,
1454--that in matters touching the Christian religion you are at
liberty to pass any law you please. No one is great and strong
enough to put down all opposition to himself when the interests
of the faith are at stake. I therefore beg and implore your
Royal Majesty to revoke the aforementioned privileges and
liberties. Prove that you are a Catholic sovereign, and remove
all occasion for disgracing your name and for worse offenses
that are likely to follow.
In his letter Oleshnitzki refers to the well-known agitator and
Jew-baiter, the Papal Legate Capistrano, who had come to Poland from
Germany in the fall of 1453. With this "scourge of the Jews" as his ally
Oleshnitzki started a campaign against Jews and heretics (or Hussites).
On his arrival in Cracow Capistrano delivered on the market-place
incendiary speeches against the Jews, and demanded of the King
persistently to revoke the "godless" Jewish privileges, threatening him,
in case of disobedience, with the tortures of hell and terrible
misfortunes for the country.
At first the King refused to yield, but the march of events favored the
anti-Jewish forces. Poland was at war with the Teutonic Order.[39] The
first defeat sustained by the Polish troops in this war (September,
1454) gave the clergy an opportunity of proclaiming that the Lord was
chastising the country for the King's disregard of Church interests and
for his protection of the Jews. At last the King was forced to listen to
the demands of the united clergy and nobility. In November, 1454, the
Statute of Nyeshava[40] was promulgated, and by one of its clauses all
former Jewish privileges were rescinded as "being equally opposed to
Divine right and earthly laws." The reasons for the enactment, which
were evidently dictated by Oleshnitzki, were formulated as follows: "For
it is not meet that infidels should enjoy greater advantages than the
worshipers of our Lord Christ, and slaves should have no right to occupy
a better position than sons." The Varta Statutes of 1423 and the former
canonical laws were declared in force again. Clericalism had scored a
triumph.
This anti-Jewish tendency communicated itself to the people at large. In
several towns the Jews were attacked. In 1463 detachments of Polish
volunteers who were preparing for a crusade against the Turks passed
through Lemberg and Cracow on their way to Hungary. The disorderly
crowd, consisting of monks, students, peasants, and impoverished
noblemen, threw itself on the Jews of Cracow on the third day of Easter,
looted their houses, and killed about thirty people. When Casimir IV.
learned what had happened, he imposed a fine on the magistracy for
having failed to forestall the riots. Similar disorders were taking
place about the same time in Lemberg, Posen, and other cities.
As far as Casimir IV. was concerned, the clerical policy, artificially
foisted upon him, did not alter his personal readiness to shield the
Jews. But under his sons, the Polish King John Albrecht and the
Lithuanian Grand Duke Alexander Yaghello, the anti-Jewish policy gained
the upper hand. The former ratified, at the Piotrkov Diet of 1496, the
Nyeshava Statute with its anti-Jewish restrictions. John Albrecht is
also credited with the establishment of the first ghetto in Poland. In
1494 a large part of the Polish capital of Cracow was destroyed by fire,
and the mob, taking advantage of the prevailing panic, plundered the
property of the Jews. As a result, the Jews, who at that time were
scattered over various parts of the city, were ordered by the King to
move to Kazimiezh,[41] a suburb of Cracow, and to live there apart from
the Christians. Kazimiezh became, in consequence, a wholly Jewish town,
leading throughout the centuries a life of its own, and connected with
the outside world by mere threads of economic relationship.
While the throne of Poland was occupied by John Albrecht, his
brother Alexander ruled over Lithuania as grand duke. At first
Alexander's attitude towards the Jews was rather favorable. In 1492 he
complied with the petition of the Karaites of Troki, and confirmed the
charter of Casimir IV., bestowing upon them the Magdeburg Law, and even
supplementing it by a few additional privileges. Various items of public
revenue, especially the customs duties, were as theretofore let to the
Jews. Alexander also paid the Jewish capitalists part of the money
advanced by them to his father. In 1495, however, the Grand Duke
suddenly issued a decree ordering the expulsion of all the Jews from
Lithuania. It is not known whether this cruel action was due to the
influence of the anti-Jewish clerical party, and was stimulated by the
news of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, or whether it was prompted
by the financial dependence of the ruler on his Jewish creditors, or by
the general desire to enrich himself at the expense of the exiles. As a
matter of fact Alexander confiscated the immovable property of the
expelled Jews in the districts of Grodno, Brest, Lutzk, and Troki, and a
large part thereof was distributed by him among the local Christian
residents. The banished Jews emigrated partly to the Crimea (Kaffa), but
the majority settled, with the permission of King John Albrecht, in the
neighboring Polish cities. However, when a few years later, after the
death of his brother, Alexander accepted, in addition, the crown of
Poland (1501), he allowed the Jews to return to Lithuania and settle in
their former places of residence. On this occasion they received back,
though not in all cases, the houses, estates, synagogues, and cemeteries
previously owned by them (1503).
By the beginning of the fourteenth century Polish Jewry had become a big
economic and social factor with which the state was bound to reckon. It
was now destined to become also an independent spiritual entity, having
stood for four hundred years under the tutelage of the Jewish center in
Germany. The further development of this new factor forms one of the
most prominent features of the next period.
FOOTNOTES:
[20] It need scarcely be pointed out that, in speaking of the Jewish
immigration into Poland, we have in mind the _predominating_ element,
which came from the West. It is quite possible that there was an
admixture of settlers from the Khazar kingdom, from the Crimea, and from
the Orient in general, who were afterwards merged with the western
element.
[21] The word signifies "the powder merchant"--five hundred years before
the invention of powder!
[22] [The most important of these were: Great Poland, in the northwest,
with the leading cities of Posen and Kalish; Little Poland, in the
southwest, with Cracow and Lublin; and Red Russia, in the south, on
which see p. 53, n. 2. In 1319 Great Poland and Little Poland were
united by Vladislav Lokietek (see p. 50), who assumed the royal title.
His son Casimir the Great annexed Red Russia. Thenceforward Great
Poland, Little Poland, and Red Russia formed part of the Polish Kingdom,
with Cracow as capital, though they were administered as separate
Provinces. On the Principality of Mazovia, see p. 85, n. 1.]
[23] Some coins bear the inscription משקא קרל פולסקי, "Meshko
(= Mechislav) Król Polski," "Meshko, king of Poland," or ברכה משקא,
"Benediction [on] Meshko." Other coins give the names of the Jewish
minters, such as Abraham, son of Isaac Nagid, Joseph Kalish, etc.
[24] [_Das Magdeburger Recht_, a collection of laws based on the famous
_Sachsenspiegel_, which was composed early in the thirteenth century in
Saxony. Owing to the fame of the court of aldermen (_Schöppenstuhl_) at
Magdeburg, the Magdeburg Law was adopted in many parts of Germany,
Bohemia, Hungary, and particularly of Poland. One of its main provisions
was the administrative and judicial independence of the municipalities.]
[25] [They were organized in mercantile guilds and trade-unions
and formed the estate of burghers, called in Polish
_mieszczanie_--pronounced _myeshchanye_--and in Latin _oppidani_,
"town-dwellers," thus standing midway between the nobility, or
_Shlakhta_ (see p. 58, n. 1), and the serfs, or _khlops_.]
[26] [The word, spelled in Polish _wojewoda_, signifies, like the
corresponding German _Herzog_, military commander. The voyevoda was
originally the leader of the army in war and the representative of the
king in times of peace. After the unification of Poland, in 1319, the
voyevodas became the administrators of the various Polish provinces (or
_voyevodstvos_) on behalf of the king. Later on their duties were
encroached upon by the starostas (see below, p. 60, n. 1). With the
growth of the influence of the nobility, which resented the authority of
the royal officials, their functions were limited to the calling of the
militia in the case of war and the exercise of jurisdiction over the
Jews of their province. They were members of the Royal Council, and as
such wielded considerable influence. Their Latin title was _palatinus_.]
[27] [_Judex Judaeorum._ He was a Christian official, generally of noble
rank. See p. 52.]
[28] [In Polish, Wladyslaw. The name is also found in the forms
Wladislaus and Ladislaus.]
[29] [_I. e._ "Span-long," so called because of his diminutive stature.]
[30] A privilege denied to them by the canons of the Church.
[31] [Lvov, written in Polish Lwów, is used by the Poles and Russians;
Lemberg is used by the Germans.]
[32] [Before Casimir the Great Red Russia formed an independent
Principality (see p. 42, n. 1). The identity of Red Russia with Galicia
has been assumed in the text for the sake of convenience. In reality Red
Russia corresponds to present-day _Eastern_ Galicia, in which the
predominating population is Little Russian or Ruthenian, while _Western_
Galicia, with Cracow, formed part of Little Poland. In addition Red
Russia included a part of the present Russian Government of Podolia.]
[33] Jan Dlugosz, called in Latin Johannes Longinus [author of _Historia
Polonica_. He died in 1480].
[34] The recently published records of the court proceedings in the
Cracow pogrom of 1407 show that its principal instigators were German
artisans and merchants who resided in that city.
[35] See p. 47 and p. 49.
[36] [Written in Polish _Szlachta_, probably derived from the old German
_slahta_, in modern German _Geschlecht_, meaning _tribe_, _caste_. The
Polish Shlakhta was in complete control of the Diet, or _sejm_
(pronounced _saym_), from which the other estates, the peasants and
burghers, were excluded almost entirely. In the course of time, the
Shlakhta succeeded also in wresting the power from the king, who became
a mere figurehead.]
[37] [In Polish, _Warta_, a town in the province of Kalish. These
conventions of the nobility assumed, in the fifteenth century, the
character of a national parliament for the whole of Poland.]
[38] [Lithuania was administered by starostas as Poland was by voyevodas
(see p. 46, n. 1). The starostas--literally "elders"--were originally
nobles holding an estate of the crown, which was given to them by the
king for special services rendered to him. In the course of time they
became, both in Lithuania and in Poland proper, governors of whole
regions, taking over many of the functions of the voyevodas. The
relationship between the two officers underwent many changes. On the
effect of this change upon the jurisdiction of the Jews compare Bloch,
_Die General-Privilegien der polnischen Judenschaft_, p. 35.]
[39] [A semi-ecclesiastic, semi-military organization of German knights,
which originated in Palestine during the Crusades, and was afterwards
transferred to Europe to propagate Christianity on the eastern confines
of Germany. The Order developed into a powerful state, which became a
great menace to Poland.]
[40] [In Polish _Nieszawa_, the meeting-place of the Diet of that year.]
[41] More exactly _Kazimierz_, the Polish form for Casimir (the Great),
after whom the town was named.
CHAPTER III
THE AUTONOMOUS CENTER IN POLAND AT ITS ZENITH (1501-1648)
1. SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CONDITIONS
In the same age in which the Jewish refugees from Spain and Portugal
were wending their steps towards the Turkish East, bands of Jewish
emigrants, fleeing from the stuffy ghettos of Germany and Austria, could
be seen wandering towards the Slavonian East, towards Poland and
Lithuania, where, during the period of the Reformation, a large
autonomous Diaspora center sprang into life. The transmigration of
Jewish centers, which is so prominent a feature of the sixteenth
century, found its expression in two parallel movements: the demolished
or impoverished centers of Western Europe were transplanted to the
countries of Eastern Europe on the one hand, and to the lands of
contiguous Western Asia on the other. Yet the destinies of the two
Eastern centers--Turkey and Poland--were not identical. The Sephardim of
Turkey were approaching the end of their brilliant historic career, and
were gradually lapsing into Asiatic stupor, while the Ashkenazim of
Poland, with a supply of fresh strength and the promise of an original
culture, were starting out on their broad historic development. The
mission of the Sephardim was a memory of the past; that of the
Ashkenazim was a hope for the future. After medieval Babylonia and
Spain, no country presented so intense a concentration of Jewish energy
and so vast a field for the development of a Jewish autonomous life as
Poland in the sixteenth and the following centuries.[42]
The uninterrupted colonization of Slavonian lands by Jewish emigrants
from Germany, which had been going on during the Middle Ages, prepared
the soil for the historic process which converted Poland from a colony
into a center of Judaism. The large Jewish population settled in the
towns and villages of Poland and Lithuania formed, not a downtrodden
caste, nor a homogeneous economic class, as in Germany, but an important
social entity, unfolding its energy in many departments of
social-economic life. It was not tied down to two exclusive occupations,
money-lending and petty trade, but it participated in all branches of
industrial endeavor, in production and manufacture, not excluding rural
avocations, such as land tenure and farming. The men of wealth among the
Jews farmed the tolls (transit and customs duties) and the excise (state
taxes collected on wine[43] and other articles of consumption), and
frequently attained to prominence as the financial agents of the kings.
When, at a later date, the Jews were hampered in the business of
tax-farming, their capital found a new outlet in the lease of crown and
Shlakhta estates, with the right of "propination,"[44] or liquor
traffic, attached to it, as well as in working the salt mines, in
timbering forests, and opening up the other resources of the soil. The
big merchants were busy exporting agrarian products from Poland into
Austria, Moldavo-Wallachia, and Turkey. The lower classes engaged in
retail trade, handicrafts, farming, vegetable-growing, gardening, and,
in some places, particularly in Lithuania, even in corn-growing.
The economic activity of the Jews, entwined with the material
life of the country by numerous threads, was bound to produce a similar
variety of form also in their legal condition. Considering the peculiar
caste structure of the Polish state and the relative political freedom
enjoyed in that semi-constitutional country by the "governing
classes"--the landed nobility, the clergy, and partly the burghers--the
legal position of the Jews was of necessity determined by the conflict
of political and class interests. Bridled by an oligarchic constitution,
the royal power was bound to clash with the vast privileges of the
landed magnates, the big Shlakhta. The latter, in turn, on the one hand
fought the claims of the petty rural Shlakhta, and on the other resisted
the advance of the Christian urban estates, the business men, and
craftsmen, who were a powerful factor, owing to their municipal autonomy
and their well-organized guilds. The fight was carried on in the Diets,
municipalities, and law courts. Within this conflict of economic
interests the clergy of the dominant Catholic Church pursued its own
line of attack. Having been weakened during the Reformation, it now
renewed its strength in consequence of the Catholic reaction and the
arduous endeavors of the Jesuits.
These estates differed in their relation to the Jews, each in accordance
with its own interests. Medieval ideas had already taken such deep root
in the Polish people that, despite the constitutional character of the
country, a humane and lawful attitude towards the Jews was out of the
question. They were appraised according to the advantages they could
bestow upon this or that class, and since in many cases what was
advantageous to one class was disadvantageous to another, a conflict of
interests was unavoidable, with the result that the Jews were the
objects of protection on the one side and the targets of persecution on
the other.
The Jews of Poland were favored by two powers within the state, by
royalty and in part by the big Shlakhta. They were opposed by two
others, the clergy and the burghers. Aside from the interests of the
exchequer, which was swelled by regular and irregular imposts upon the
Jews, the kings derived personal benefits from their commercial
activities. They valued the financial services of the Jewish
tax-farmers, who paid large sums in advance for the lease of customs
duties and state revenues or for the tenure of the royal domains. These
contractors and tenants became, as a rule, financial agents of the
kings, owing to their ability to advance large sums of money, and were
incidentally in a position to exert their influence upon the court in
the interest of their coreligionists. The high nobility in turn
appreciated the usefulness of the Jewish farmers and tenants to their
estates, which they themselves, with their aristocratic indifference and
indolence, knew only how to mismanage. The protection which this class
accorded the Jews, principally at the Diets controlled by them, was in
exact proportion to the services rendered by the Jews as middlemen
between them and the peasants. The magnates accordingly were entirely
indifferent to the welfare of the rest of Jewry, the toiling masses of
the Jewish population.
Uncompromising hostility to the Jews marked the attitude of the urban
estates, the merchants and artisans of the burgher class, with a
considerable sprinkling of German settlers, whose influence was clearly
noticeable. These organized tradesmen and handicraftsmen looked upon the
Jews as their direct competitors. The magistracies, acting as the organs
of municipal self-government, placed severe restrictions upon the Jews
in the acquisition of real estate and in the pursuit of business and
handicrafts, while the trade-unions occasionally set the riotous mobs at
their heels. Still more resolute was the agitation of the Catholic
clergy, which frequently succeeded in influencing legislation in the
spirit of ecclesiastic intolerance.
The interaction of all these forces shaped the legal and social status
of the Polish-Lithuanian Jews in the course of the sixteenth and in the
beginning of the seventeenth century, at a time when Poland was passing
through the zenith of her political prosperity. The vacillations and
upheavals in the position of the Jews were conditioned by the shifting
of forces in the direction of the one or the other above-mentioned
factors in the course of history.
2. THE LIBERAL RÉGIME OF SIGISMUND I.
The opening years of the sixteenth century found the Jews fully restored
to the rights of which their enemies had attempted to rob them at the
end of the preceding century. Alexander Yaghello, the very same
Lithuanian Grand Duke who, from some obscure motive, had banished the
Jews from his dominions in 1495,[45] found it necessary to call them
back as soon as he ascended the throne of Poland, after the demise of
his brother. In 1503, "having consulted the lords of the realm," King
Alexander announced his decision to the effect that the Jews exiled from
Grodno and other cities of Lithuania should be allowed to return and
settle "near the castles and in the localities in which they had lived
formerly," and should be given back the houses, synagogues, cemeteries,
farms, and fields, which had previously been in their possession. The
reasons for this change of front may easily be traced to the vast
economic importance of the Jews of the Polish Kingdom, which had shortly
before, in 1501, entered into a closer union with Lithuania, and to the
invaluable services of the Jewish tax-farmers, on whom the royal budget
to a large extent depended.
One of these "royal financiers" was the wealthy Yosko,[46] who farmed
the customs and tolls in nearly half of Poland. To stimulate the
endeavors of his financier, King Alexander exempted Yosko and his
employees from the authority of the local administration, placing him,
after the manner of court dignitaries, under the jurisdiction of the
royal court. But, taken as a whole, the King was even now far from
friendly to the Jews. In 1505 he permitted the inclusion of the ancient
charter of Boleslav of Kalish, the _magna charta_ of Jewish liberties,
in the code of organic Polish laws, which was then being edited by the
chancellor John Laski. But he was careful to point out that he did not
thereby intend to ratify Boleslav's charter anew, but allowed its
reproduction "for the purpose of safeguarding [the Christian population]
against the Jews" (_ad cautelam defensionis contra Judaeos_).
Alexander's successor, Sigismund I. Yaghello (1506-1548), King of Poland
and Grand Duke of Lithuania, favored a more liberal policy towards his
Jewish subjects. Though a staunch Catholic, Sigismund was free from the
spirit of anti-Jewish clericalism, and he endeavored to the best of his
ability to live up to the principle proclaimed by him, that "equal
justice should be meted out to the rich and mighty lords and to the
meanest pauper." This lofty principle, so little compatible with the
policy of class discrimination, could, however inadequately, be applied
only there where the power of royalty was not handicapped by the mighty
Shlakhta and the other estates. The only part of the Polish Empire where
such a condition still existed in the time of Sigismund I. was
Lithuania, the patrimony of the Yaghellos. There the royal, or rather
the grand ducal, authority was more extensive and its form of
manifestation more patriarchal than in the provinces of the Crown, or
Poland proper. By intrusting a large part of the public tax contracts
and land leases to the Jewish capitalists, the King could feel easy in
his mind as to the integrity of his budget. The general contractor of
the customs and other state revenues in Lithuania, Michael Yosefovich
(son of Joseph), a Jew from Brest-Litovsk, exercised occasionally also
the functions of grand ducal treasurer, being commissioned to pay out of
the collected imposts the salaries of the local officials as well as the
debts of his royal master.
Prompted by the desire of rewarding the services of his financier and at
the same time putting the communal affairs of his Jewish subjects in
better order, Sigismund appointed Michael Yosefovich to serve as the
elder, or, to use the official term, the "senior," of all Lithuanian
Jews (1514). The "senior" was invested with far-reaching powers: he had
the right of conferring directly with the king in all important Jewish
affairs, dispensing justice to his coreligionists in accordance with
their own laws, and collecting from them the taxes imposed by the state.
He was to be assisted by a rabbi or "doctor," an expert in Jewish law.
Whether the Lithuanian Jews acknowledged Michael Yosefovich as their
supreme authority is open to doubt. The wealthy contractor, whom the
will of the King had placed at the head of the Jews, could not in point
of fact preside over their autonomous organization and their judiciary
and rabbinate, since what was required was not officials, but men with
special knowledge and training. All Michael could do was to act as the
official go-between, representing the Jewish communities before the King
and defending their rights and privileges as well as their commercial
and fiscal interests. In any event Michael was more useful to his
coreligionists than his brother Abraham Yosefovich, who, likewise a
tax-farmer, sacrificed his Judaism for the sake of a successful career.
King Alexander conferred upon Abraham the rank of Starosta of Smolensk,
while Sigismund raised him to the exalted position of Chancellor of the
Lithuanian Exchequer. Abraham and his offspring were soon lost in the
ranks of the higher Polish nobility.
In agricultural Lithuania with its patriarchal conditions of life the
antagonism between the classes was in its infancy, and as a result the
right of the Jews to freedom of transit and occupation was but rarely
contested. They lived in the towns and villages, and were not yet so
sharply marked off, in language and mode of life, from the Christian
population as they became afterwards. The Jewish communities of Brest,
Grodno, Pinsk, and Troki, the last consisting principally of Karaites,
who had a municipality of their own, were important Jewish centers in
the Duchy, and enjoyed considerable autonomy. The rabbi of Brest, Mendel
Frank, received from the King extensive administrative and judicial
powers, including the right of imposing the _herem_ and other penalties
upon the recalcitrant members of the community (1531).
In the large cities of Poland proper the position of the Jews was not
nearly so favorable. Here commercial life had attained a higher stage of
development than in Lithuania, and in many lines of business the Jews
competed with the Christians. Taking advantage of the autonomy granted
to the estates in the shape of the Magdeburg Law, the Christian business
men and handicraftsmen, represented by their magistracies and
trade-unions, were constantly endeavoring to restrict their rivals in
their commercial pursuits. This was particularly the case in Posen,
Cracow, and Lemberg, the leading centers respectively of the three
provinces of Great Poland, Little Poland, and Red Russia (Galicia). In
Posen the Jews were hampered by the burgomaster and the aldermen in
carrying on their business or in displaying their goods in stores
outside the Jewish quarter. When the Jews protested to the King, he
warned the authorities of Posen not to subject their rivals to any
hardships or to violate their privileges (1517). The Christian merchants
retorted that the Jews occupied the best shops, not only in the center
of the town, but also on the market-place, where formerly only
"prominent Christian merchants, both native and foreign [German], had
been doing business," and where, in view of the concentration of large
masses of Christians, the presence of Jews might lead to "great
temptations," and even to seduction from the path of the "true faith."
The reference to religion, used as a cloak for commercial greed, did not
fail to impress the devout Sigismund, and he forbade the Jews to keep
stores on the market-place (1520). The professors of Christian love in
Posen similarly forbade their Jewish fellow-citizens to buy foodstuffs
and other articles in the market until the Christian residents had
completed their purchases. A little later the King, in consequence of
the influx of Jews into Posen, gave orders that no new Jewish settlers
be admitted into the city, and that no houses owned by Christians be
sold to them, without the permission of the Kahal elders. The Jews were
to be restricted to definite quarters and to be denied the right of
building their houses among those belonging to Christians (1523).
The same was the case in Lemberg. Yielding to the complaints of the
magistracy about the competition of the Jews, the King restricted their
freedom of commerce in several particulars, barring them from selling
cloth in the whole of [Red] Russia and Podolia, except at the fairs, and
limiting their sale of horned cattle to two thousand head per year
(1515). The Piotrkov Diet of 1521 passed a law confining the trade of
the Lemberg Jews to four articles, wax, furs, cloth, and horned cattle.
These restrictions were the result of the widespread agitation which the
pious Christian merchants had been conducting against their business
rivals of other faiths. The magistracies of the three cities of Posen,
Lemberg, and Cracow, attempted to form a coalition for the purpose of
carrying on a joint economic fight against Jewry. In Cracow and its
suburb Kazimiezh[47] the Jews had to endure even harsher restrictions in
business than in the other two metropolitan centers of Poland.
Competition in business occasionally resulted in physical violence and
street riots. Anti-Jewish attacks were taking place in Posen and in
Brest-Kuyavsk,[48] and outbreaks were anticipated in Cracow.
Representatives of the last Jewish community made their apprehensions
known to the King. Sigismund issued a decree in 1530 denouncing in
vehement terms the insolence of the rioters, who were hoping for
immunity, and rigorously forbidding all acts of violence, under penalty
of death and confiscation of property. To allay the fears of the Jews he
ordered the burghers of Cracow to deposit the sum of ten thousand gulden
with the exchequer as security for the maintenance of peace and safety
in the city. The burgomasters, aldermen, and trade-unions were warned by
the King that in all their differences with Jews "they should proceed in
a legal manner, and not by violence, by resorting to force of arms and
inciting disorders."
The King was powerless, however, to shield the Jews against other
unpleasant manifestations of the Polish class _régime_, such as the
extortions of the officials. The highest dignitaries of the court no
less than the local administration were ever ready to fish in the
troubled waters of the conflict of classes. The second wife of
Sigismund, Queen Bona Sforza, an avaricious Italian princess, sold the
offices of the state to the highest bidder, while the courtiers and
voyevodas were just as venal on their own behalf. The queen's favorite,
Peter Kmita, Voyevoda of Cracow and Marshal of the Crown, managed to
accept bribes simultaneously from the Jewish and the Christian
merchants, who lodged complaints against each other, by promising both
sides to defend their interests before the Diet or the King.
During the fourth decade of the sixteenth century the Jewish question
became the object of violent disputes at the Polish Diets, the deputies
of several regions having received anti-Jewish instructions.[49] Now the
controlling factor in the Polish Diets was the Shlakhta, whose attitude
towards the Jews was not uniform. The big Shlakhta, the magnates, the
owners of huge estates and whole towns, were favorably disposed towards
the Jews who lived in their domains, and added to their wealth as
farmers and tax-payers. But the petty Shlakhta, the struggling squires,
who were looking for places in the civil and state service, arrayed
themselves on the side of the burgher class, which had always been
hostile to the Jews. This petty Shlakhta bitterly resented the fact that
the royal revenues had been turned over to Jewish contractors, who, as
collectors of customs and taxes, attained to official dignity, and
gradually forced their way into the ranks of the nobility. The income
from the collection of the revenues and the influence connected with it
this Shlakhta regarded as its inalienable prerogative. The clergy again
saw in this enhancement of Jewish influence a serious menace to the
Catholic faith, while the urban estates had a vital interest in limiting
the commercial rights of the Jews.
At the Piotrkov Diet of 1538 the anti-Jewish agitation was carried
on with considerable success. It resulted in the adoption of a statute,
or a "constitution," containing a separate Jewish section, in which the
old canonical laws cropped out:
We hereby prescribe and decree--it is stated in that
section--that from now on and for all future time all those who
manage our revenues must unconditionally be members of the
landed nobility, and persons professing the Christian faith....
We ordain for inviolable observance that no Jews shall be
intrusted [in the capacity of contractors] with the collection
of revenues of any kind. For it is unworthy and contrary to
divine right that persons of this description should be admitted
to any kind of honors or to the discharge of public functions
among Christian people.
It is further decreed that the Jews have no right of unrestricted
commerce, and can do no business in any locality, except with the
special permission of the king or by agreement with the magistracies; in
the villages they are forbidden to trade altogether. Pawnbroking and
money-lending on the part of Jews are hedged about by a series of
oppressive regulations. The capstone of the Piotrkov "constitution" is
the following clause:
Whereas the Jews, disregarding the ancient regulations, have
thrown off the marks by which they were distinguishable from the
Christians, and have arrogated to themselves a form of dress
which closely resembles that of the Christians, so that it is
impossible to recognize them, be it resolved for permanent
observance: that the Jews of our realm, all and sundry, in
whatever place they happen to be found, shall wear special
marks, to wit, a barret, or hat, or some other headgear of
yellow cloth. Exception is to be made in favor of travelers,
who, while on the road, shall be permitted to discard or conceal
marks of this kind.
The fine for violating this regulation is fixed at one gulden.
The only articles of the "constitution" of 1538 which had serious
consequences for the Jews of the Crown--the Jews of Lithuania were not
affected by these regulations--were those barring them from tax-farming
and subjecting them to commercial restrictions. The canonical law
concerning a distinctive headgear was more in the nature of a
demonstration than a serious legal enactment, since compliance with it,
owing to the high state of culture among the Polish Jews and their
important rôle in the economic life of the country, was a matter of
impossibility. Behind this regulation lurks the hand of the Catholic
clergy, which was alarmed at that time by the initial successes of the
Reformation in Poland, and was in fear that the influence of Judaism
might enhance the progress of the heresy. The excited imagination of the
clerical fanatics perceived signs of a "Jewish propaganda" in the
rationalistic doctrine of "Anti-Trinitarianism," which was then making
its appearance, denying the dogma of the Holy Trinity. The specter of a
rising sect of "Judaizers" haunted the guardians of the Church. One
occurrence in particular engendered tremendous excitement among the
inhabitants of Cracow. A Catholic woman of that city, Catherine
Zaleshovska by name, the wife of an alderman, and four score years of
age, was convicted of denying the fundamental dogmas of Christianity and
adhering secretly to Jewish doctrines. The Bishop of Cracow, Peter
Gamrat, having made futile endeavors to bring Catherine back into the
fold of the Church, condemned her to death. The unfortunate woman was
burned at the stake on the market-place of Cracow in 1539.
The following description of this event was penned by an eye-witness,
the Polish writer Lucas Gurnitzki:
The priest Gamrat, Bishop of Cracow, assembled all canons and
collegiates in order to examine her [Catherine Zaleshovska, who
had been accused of "Judaizing"] as to her principles of faith.
When, in accordance with our creed, she was asked whether she
believed in Almighty God, the Creator of heaven and earth, she
replied: "I believe in God, who created all that we see and do
not see, who cannot be comprehended by the human reason, who
poureth forth His bounty over man and over all things in the
universe." "Do you believe in His only begotten Son, Jesus
Christ, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost?" she was asked.
She answered: "The Lord God has neither wife nor son, nor does
He need them. For sons are needed by those who die, but God is
eternal, and since He was not born, it is impossible that He
should die. It is we whom He considers His sons, and His sons
are those who walk in His paths." Here the collegiates shouted:
"Thou utterest evil, thou miserable one! Bethink thyself! Surely
there are prophecies that the Lord would send His Son into the
world to be crucified for our sins, in order that we, having
been disobedient from the days of our ancestor Adam, may be
reconciled to God the Father?" A great deal more was said by the
learned men to the apostate woman, but the more they spoke, the
more stubborn was she in her contention that God was not and
could not be born as a human being. When it was found impossible
to detach her from her Jewish beliefs, it was decided to convict
her of blasphemy. She was taken to the city jail, and a few days
later she was burned. She went to her death without the
slightest fear.
The well-known contemporary chronicler Bielski expresses himself
similarly: "She went to her death as if it were a wedding."
During the same time there were rumors afloat to the effect that in
various places in Poland, particularly in the province of Cracow, many
Christians were embracing Judaism, and, after undergoing circumcision,
were fleeing for greater safety to Lithuania, where they were sheltered
by the local Jews. When the rumor reached the King, he dispatched two
commissioners to Lithuania to direct a strict investigation. The
officers of the King proceeded with excessive ardor; they raided Jewish
homes, and stopped travelers on the road, making arrests and holding
cross-examinations. The inquiry failed to reveal the presence of
Judaizing sectarians in Lithuania, though it caused the Jews
considerable trouble and alarm (1539).
Scarcely had this investigation been closed when the Lithuanian Jews
were faced by another charge. Many of them were said to be on the point
of leaving the country, and, acting with the knowledge and co-operation
of the Sultan, intended to emigrate to Turkey, accompanied by the
Christians who had been converted to Judaism. It was even rumored that
the Jews had already succeeded in dispatching a party of circumcised
Christian children and adults across the Moldavian frontier. The King
gave orders for a new investigation, which was marked, like the
preceding one, by acts of lawlessness and violence. The Jews were in
fear that the King might lend an ear to these accusations and withdraw
his protection from them. Accordingly Jews of Brest, Grodno, and other
Lithuanian cities, hastened to send a deputation to King Sigismund,
which solemnly assured him that all the rumors and accusations
concerning them were mere slander, that the Lithuanian Jews were
faithfully devoted to their country, that they had no intention to
emigrate to Turkey, and, finally, that they had never tried to convert
Christians to their faith. At the same time they made complaints about
the insults and brutalities which had been inflicted upon them, pointing
to the detrimental effect of the investigation on the trade of the
country. The assertions of the deputation were borne out by the official
inquiry, and Sigismund, returning his favor to the Jews, cleared them of
all suspicion, and promised henceforward not to trouble them on
wholesale charges unsupported by evidence. This pledge was embodied in a
special charter, a sort of _habeas corpus_, granted by the King to the
Jews of Lithuania in 1540.
All this, however, did not discourage the Catholic clergy, who, under
the leadership of Bishop Gamrat, continued their agitation against the
hated Jews. They incited public opinion against them by means of
slanderous books, written in medieval style (_De stupendis erroribus
Judaeorum_, 1541; _De sanctis interfectis a Judaeis_, 1543). The Church
Synod of 1542 assembled in Piotrkov issued the following "constitution":
The Synod, taking into consideration the many dangers that
confront the Christians and the Church from the large number of
Jews who, having been driven from the neighboring countries,
have been admitted into Poland, and unscrupulously combine
holiness with ungodliness, has passed the following resolution:
Lest the great concentration of Jews in the country lead, as
must be apprehended, to even worse consequences, his Majesty the
King be petitioned as follows: 1. That in the diocese of Gnesen
and particularly in the city of Cracow[50] the number of Jews be
reduced to a fixed norm, such as the district set aside for them
can accommodate. 2. That in all other places where the Jews did
not reside in former times they be denied the right of
settlement, and be forbidden to buy houses from Christians,
those already bought to be returned to their former owners. 3.
That the new synagogues, even those erected by them in the city
of Cracow, be ordered to be demolished. 4. Whereas the Church
suffers the Jews for the sole purpose of recalling to our minds
the tortures of our Saviour, their number shall in no
circumstances increase. Moreover, according to the regulations
of the holy canons, they shall be permitted only to repair their
old synagogues but not erect new ones.
This is followed by seven more clauses containing various restrictions.
The Jews are forbidden to keep Christian servants in their houses,
particularly nursery-maids, to act as stewards of estates belonging to
nobles ("lest those who ought to be the slaves of Christians should
thereby acquire dominion and jurisdiction over them"), to work and to
trade on Catholic holidays, and to offer their goods publicly for sale
even on weekdays. It goes without saying that the rule prescribing a
distinguishing Jewish dress is not neglected.
This whole anti-Jewish fabric of laws, which the members of the Synod
decided to submit to the King, failed to receive legal sanction. Still
the Catholic clergy was for a long time guided by it in its policy
towards the Jews, a policy, needless to say, of intolerance and gross
prejudices. These restrictions were the _pia desideria_ of priests and
monks, some of which were realized during the subsequent Catholic
reaction.
3. LIBERALISM AND REACTION IN THE REIGNS OF SIGISMUND AUGUSTUS AND
STEPHEN BATORY
Sigismund I.'s successor, the cultured and to some extent liberal-minded
Sigismund II. Augustus (1548-1572), followed in his relations with the
Jews the same principles of toleration and non-interference by which he
was generally guided in his attitude towards the non-Christian and
non-Catholic citizens of Poland. In the first year of his reign
Sigismund II., complying with the request of the Jews of Great Poland,
ratified, at the general Polish Diet held at Piotrkov, the old liberal
statute of Casimir IV. In the preamble of this enactment the King
declares that he confirms the rights and privileges of the Jews on the
same grounds as the special privileges of the other estates, in other
words, by virtue of his oath to uphold the constitution. Sigismund
Augustus considerably amplified and solidified the self-government of
the Jewish communities. He bestowed large administrative and judicial
powers upon the rabbis and Kahal elders, sanctioning the application of
"Jewish law" (_i. e._ of Biblical and Talmudical law) in civil and
partly even criminal cases between Jews (1551). In the general voyevoda
courts, in which cases between Jews and Christians were tried, the
presence of Jewish "seniors," _i. e._ of duly elected Kahal elders, was
required (1556). This liability of the Jews to the royal or voyevoda
courts had long constituted one of their important privileges, since it
exempted them from the municipal, or magistrates' courts, which were
just as hostile to them as the magistracies themselves.
This prerogative--the guarantee of greater impartiality on the part of
the royal court--was limited to the Jews residing in the royal cities
and villages, and did not extend to those living on the estates of the
nobles or in the townships owned by them. Sigismund I. had decreed that
"the nobles having Jews in their towns and villages may enjoy all the
advantages to be derived from them, but must also try their cases. For
we [the King], not deriving any advantages from such Jews, are not
obliged to secure justice for them" (1539). Sigismund Augustus now
enacted similarly that the Jews living on hereditary Shlakhta estates
should be liable to the jurisdiction of the "hereditary owner," not to
that of the royal representatives, the voyevoda and sub-voyevoda. As for
the other royal privileges, they were extended to the Jews of this
category only on condition of their paying the special Jewish head-tax
to the King (1549). The split between royalty and Shlakhta, which became
conspicuous in the reign of Sigismund Augustus, had already begun to
undermine the system of royal patronage, more and more weakened as time
went on.
The relations between the Jews and the "third estate," the burghers, did
not improve in the reign of Sigismund Augustus, but they assumed a more
definite shape. The two competing agencies, the magistracies and the
Kahals, regulated their mutual relations by means of compacts and
agreements. In some cities, such as Cracow and Posen, these compacts
were designed to safeguard the boundaries of the ghetto, outside of
which the Jews had no right to live; in Posen the Jews were even
forbidden to increase the number of Jewish houses over and above a fixed
norm (49), with the result that they were obliged to build tall houses,
with several stories. In other cities, among which was included the city
of Warsaw,[51] the magistracies managed to obtain the so-called
privilege _de non tolerandis Judaeis_, _i. e._ the right of either not
admitting the Jews to settle anew, and confining those already settled
to special sections of the city, away from the principal streets, or
keeping the Jews away from the city altogether, allowing only the
merchants to come on business and stay there for a few days. However, in
the majority of Polish cities the protection of the King secured for the
Jews equal rights with the other townspeople. For, as one of the royal
edicts puts it, "inasmuch as the Jews carry all burdens in the same way
as the burghers, their positions must be alike in everything, except in
religion and jurisdiction." In some places the King even went so far as
to forbid the holding of the weekly market-day on Saturday, to safeguard
the commercial interests of the Jews, who refused to do business on
their day of rest.
With all the estates of Poland the Jews managed reasonably to agree save
only with the Catholic clergy. This implacable foe of Judaism doubled
his efforts as soon as the signal from Rome was given to start a
reaction against the growing heresy of Protestantism and to combat all
other forms of non-Catholic belief. The policy of Paul IV., the
inquisitor on the throne of St. Peter, found an echo in Poland. The
Papal Nuncio Lippomano, having arrived from Rome, conceived the idea of
firing the religious zeal of the Catholics by one of those bloody
spectacles which the inquisitorial Church was wont to arrange
occasionally _ad maiorem Dei gloriam_. A rumor was set afloat that a
poor woman in Sokhachev, Dorothy Lazhentzka by name, had sold to the
Jews of the town the holy wafer received by her during communion, and
that the wafer was stabbed by the "infidels" until it began to bleed. By
order of the Bishop of Khelm three Jews who were charged with this
sacrilege and their accomplice Dorothy Lazhentzka were thrown into
prison, put on the rack, and finally sentenced to death. On learning of
these happenings, the King sent orders to the Starosta of Sokhachev to
stop the execution of the death sentence, but the clergy hastened to
carry out the verdict,[52] and the alleged blasphemers were burned at
the stake (1556). Before their death the martyred Jews made the
following declaration:
We have never stabbed the host, because we do not believe that
the host is the Divine body (_nos enim nequaquam credimus
hostiae inesse Dei corpus_), knowing that God has no body nor
blood. We believe, as did our forefathers, that the Messiah is
not God, but His messenger. We also know from experience that
there can be no blood in flour.
These protestations of a monotheistic faith were silenced by the
executioner, who stopped "the mouths of the criminals with burning
torches."
Sigismund Augustus was shocked by these revolting proceedings, which had
been engineered by the Nuncio Lippomano. He was quick to grasp that at
the bottom of the absurd rumor concerning the "wounded" host lay a
"pious fraud," the desire to demonstrate the truth of the Eucharist
dogma in its Catholic formulation (the bread of communion as the actual
body of Christ), which was rejected by the Calvinists and the extreme
wing of the Reformation. "I am shocked by this hideous villainy," the
King exclaimed in a fit of religious skepticism, "nor am I sufficiently
devoid of common sense to believe that there could be any blood in the
host." Lippomano's conduct aroused in particular the indignation of the
Polish Protestants, who on dogmatic grounds could not give credence to
the medieval fable concerning miracle-working hosts. All this did not
prevent the enemies of the Jews from exploiting the Sokhachev case in
the interest of an anti-Jewish agitation. It was in all likelihood due
to this agitation that the anti-Jewish "constitution" adopted by the
Diet of 1538 was, at the insistence of numerous deputies, confirmed by
the Diets of 1562 and 1565.
The articles of this anti-Semitic "constitution" were also embodied in
the "Lithuanian Statute" promulgated in 1566. This "statute" interdicts
the Jews from wearing the same style of clothes as the Christians and
altogether from dressing smartly, from owning serfs or keeping domestics
of the Christian faith, and from holding office among Christians, the
last two restrictions being extended to the Tatars and other "infidels."
The medieval libels found a favorable soil even in Lithuania. In 1564 a
Jew was executed in Bielsk, on the charge of having killed a Christian
girl, though the unfortunate victim loudly proclaimed his innocence from
the steps of the scaffold. Nor were attempts wanting to manufacture
similar trials in other Lithuanian localities. To put an end to the
agitation fostered by fanatics and obscurantists, the King issued two
decrees, in 1564 and 1566, in which the local authorities were strictly
enjoined not to institute proceedings against Jews on the charge of
ritual murder or desecration of hosts. Sigismund Augustus declares that
experience and papal pronouncements had proved the groundlessness of
such charges; that, in accordance with ancient Jewish privileges, all
such charges must be substantiated by the testimony of four Christian
and three Jewish witnesses, and that, finally, the jurisdiction in all
such cases belongs to the King himself and his Council at the General
Diet.
Soon afterwards, in 1569, the agreement known as the "Union of Lublin"
was concluded between Lithuania and the Crown, or Poland proper,
providing for closer administrative and legislative co-operation between
the two countries. This resulted in the co-ordination of the
constitutional legislation for both parts of the "Republic,"[53] which,
in turn, affected injuriously the status of the Jews of Lithuania. The
latter country was gradually drawn into the general current of Polish
politics, and hence drifted away from the patriarchal order of things,
which had built up the prosperity of the Jews in the days of Vitovt.
Sigismund Augustus died in 1572, three years after the conclusion of the
Union of Lublin. The Jews had good reason to mourn the loss of this
King, who had been their principal protector. His death marks the
extinction of the Yaghello dynasty, and a new chapter begins in the
history of Poland, "the elective period," when the kings are chosen by
vote. After a protracted interregnum, the Shlakhta elected the French
prince Henry of Valois (1574), one of the instigators of the Massacre of
St. Bartholomew. This election greatly alarmed the Jews and the
liberal-minded Poles, who anticipated a recrudescence of clericalism;
but their fears were soon allayed. After a few months' stay in Poland,
Henry fled to his native land to accept the French crown, on the death
of his brother Charles IX. The throne of Poland fell, by popular vote,
to Stephen Batory (1576-1586), the valorous and enlightened Hungarian
duke. His brief reign, which marks the end of the "golden age" of Polish
history, was signalized by several acts of justice in relation to the
Jews. In 1576 Stephen Batory issued two edicts, strictly forbidding the
impeachment of Jews on the charge of ritual murder or sacrilege, in view
of the recognized falsity of these accusations[54] and the popular
disturbances accompanying them.
Stephen Batory even went one step further in pursuing the principle,
that the Jews, because of their usefulness to the country on account of
their commercial activity, had a claim to the same treatment as the
corresponding Christian estates. In ratifying the old charters, he added
a number of privileges, bearing in particular on the freedom of
commerce. The King directed the voyevodas to protect the legitimate
interests of the Jews against the encroachments of the magistracies and
trade-unions, who hampered them in every possible manner in their
pursuit of trades and handicrafts.
Stephen Batory intervened on behalf of the Jews of Posen, who had long
been oppressed by a hostile magistracy. Setting aside the draconian
regulations of the city fathers, the commercial rivals of the Jews, he
permitted the latter to hire business premises in all parts of the city
and ply their trade even on the days of the Christian festivals.
Anticipating the possibility of retaliatory measures on the part of the
townspeople, the King impressed upon the magistracy the duty of
safeguarding the inviolability of life and property in the city, at the
risk of incurring the severest penalties in the case of neglect (1577).
All these warnings, however, were powerless to avert a catastrophe.
Three months after the promulgation of the royal edict the Jewish
quarter in Posen was attacked by the mob, which looted Jewish property
and killed a number of Jews. Ostensibly the riot was started because of
the refusal of the Jews to allow one of their coreligionists, who was on
the point of accepting baptism, to meet his wife. In reality this was
nothing but a pretext. The attack had been prepared by the Christian
merchants, who could not reconcile themselves to the extension of the
commercial rights of their competitors. Batory imposed a heavy fine on
the Posen magistracy for having failed to stop the disorders. Only when
the members of the magistracy declared under oath that they had been
entirely ignorant of the plot was the fine revoked.
As far as the Jews are concerned, Stephen Batory remained loyal to the
traditions of a more liberal age, at a time when the Polish populace was
already inoculated with the ideas of the "Catholic reaction" imported
from Western Europe--ideas which in other respects the King himself was
unable to resist. It was during his reign that the Jesuits, Peter Skarga
and others, made their appearance as an active, organized body. Batory
extended his patronage to them, and intrusted them with the management
of the academy established by him at Vilna. Was it possible for the
King to foresee all the evil, darkness, and intolerance which these
Jesuit schools would spread all over Poland? Could it have occurred to
him that in these seats of learning, which soon monopolized the
education of the ruling as well as the middle classes, one of the chief
subjects of instruction would be a systematic course in Jew-baiting?
4. SHLAKHTA AND ROYALTY IN THE REIGNS OF SIGISMUND III. AND VLADISLAV
IV.
The results of the upheaval which accompanied the extinction of the
Yaghello dynasty assumed definite shape under the first two kings of the
Swedish Vasa dynasty, Sigismund III. (1588-1632) and Vladislav IV.
(1632-1648). The elective character of royalty made the latter dependent
on the Shlakhta, which practically ruled the country, subordinating
parliamentary legislation to the aristocratic and agricultural interests
of their estate, and almost monopolizing the posts of voyevodas,
starostas, and other important officials. At the same time the activity
of the Jesuits strengthened the influence of clericalism in all
departments of life. To eradicate Protestantism, to oppress the Greek
Orthodox "peasant Church," and to reduce the Jews to the level of an
ostracized caste of outlaws--such was the program of the Catholic
reaction in Poland.
To attain these ends draconian measures were adopted against the
Evangelists and Arians.[55] The members of the Greek Orthodox Church
were forced against their will into a union with the Catholics, and the
rights of the "dissidents," or non-conformists, were constantly
curtailed. The Jesuits, who managed to obtain control over the education
of the growing generation, inoculated the Polish people with the virus
of clericalism. The less the zealots of the Church had reason to expect
the conversion of the Jews, the more did they despise and humiliate
them. And if they did not altogether succeed in restoring the medieval
order of things, it was no doubt due to the fact that the structure of
the Polish state, with its irrepressible conflict of class interests,
did not allow any kind of system to take firm root. "Poland subsists on
disorders," was the boast of the political leaders of the age. The
"golden liberty" of the Shlakhta degenerated more and more. It became a
weapon in the hands of the higher classes to oppress the middle and the
lower classes. It led to anarchy, it undermined the authority of the
Diet, in which a single member could impose his veto on the decision of
the whole assembly (the so-called _liberum veto_), and resulted in
endless dissensions between the estates. On the other hand, one must not
forget that, while this division of power was disastrous for Poland, the
absolute concentration of power after the pattern of Western Europe, in
the circumstances then prevailing, might have proved even more
disastrous. Under a system of monarchic absolutism, Poland might have
become, during the period of the Catholic reaction, another Spain of
Philip II. Disorder and class strife saved the Polish people from the
"order" of the Inquisition and the consistency of autocratic hangmen.
The championship of Jewish interests passed by degrees from the hands of
royalty into those of the wealthy parliamentary Shlakhta. Though more
and more permeated by clerical tendencies, the fruit of Jesuit
schooling, the nobility in most cases held its protecting hand over the
Jews, to whom it was tied by the community of economic interests. The
Jewish tax-collector in the towns and townlets, which were privately
owned by the nobles, the Jewish _arendar_[56] in the village, who
procured an income for the _pan_[57] from dairying, milling, distilling,
liquor-selling and other enterprises--they were indispensable to the
easy-going magnate, who was wont to let his estates take care of
themselves, and while away his time in the capital, at the court, in
merry amusements, or at the tumultuous sessions of the national and
provincial assemblies, where politics were looked upon as a form of
entertainment rather than a serious pursuit. This Polish aristocracy put
a check on the anti-Semitic endeavors of the clergy, and confined the
oppression of the Jews within certain limits. Even the devout Sigismund
III., who was subject to Jesuit influence, continued the traditional
rôle of Jewish protector. In 1588, shortly after his accession to the
throne, he confirmed, at the request of the Jews, their right of trading
in the cities, though not without certain restrictions which the demands
of the Christian merchants had forced upon him.
Nevertheless the economic struggle in the cities continues with
ever-increasing fury, manifesting itself more and more in the shape of
malign religious fanaticism. In many cities the municipalities arrogate
to themselves judicial authority over the Jews--the authority of the
wolves over the sheep--contrary to the fundamental Polish law, which
places all litigation between Jews and Christians under the jurisdiction
of the royal officials, the voyevodas and starostas. The king, appealed
to by the injured, has frequent occasion to remind the magistracies that
the Jews are not to be judged by the Magdeburg Law, but by common Polish
law, in addition to their own rabbinical courts for internal disputes. A
pronouncement of this nature was issued, among others, by King Sigismund
III., when the Jews of Brest appealed to him against the local
municipality (1592). Their appeal was supported by the head of the
Jewish community, Saul Yudich (son of Judah), contractor of customs and
other state revenues in Lithuania, who wielded considerable influence at
the Polish court. He bore the title of "servant of the king," and was
frequently in a position to render important services to his
coreligionists.[58] But where the Jewish masses were not fortunate
enough to possess such powerful advocates in the persons of the big
tax-farmers and "servants of the king," their legitimate interests were
frequently trampled upon. The burghers of Vilna, in their desire to
dislodge their Jewish competitors from the city, did not stop at open
violence. They demolished the synagogue, and sacked the Jewish
residences in the houses owned by the Shlakhta (1592). In Kiev, where
the Jews had been settled in the Old Russian period,[59] the burghers
were endeavoring to secure from the King the privilege _de non
tolerandis Judaeis_ (1619).
The hostility of the burgher class, which was made up of Germans to a
considerable extent, manifested itself with particular intensity in the
old hotbed of anti-Semitism, in Posen. Attacks on the Jewish quarter on
the part of the street mob and "lawful" persecutions on the part of the
magistracy and trade-unions were a regular feature in the life of that
city. In the case of several trades, as, for instance, in the needle
trade, the Jewish artisans were restricted to Jewish customers. In 1618
a painter employed to paint the walls of the Posen town hall drew all
kinds of figures which were extremely offensive to the Jews, and
subjected them to the ridicule of an idle street mob. Two years later
the local clergy spread the rumor, that the table on which the famous
three hosts had been pierced by the Jews in 1399[60] had been
accidentally discovered in the house of a Jew. The fictitious relic was
transferred to the Church of the Carmelites in a solemn procession,
headed by the Bishop and the whole local priesthood. This demonstration
helped to inflame the populace against the Jews. The crowd, fed on such
spectacles, lost the last sparks of humanity. The scholars of the Jesuit
colleges frequently invaded the Jewish quarter, making sport of the Jews
and committing all kinds of excesses, in strange contradiction to the
precept of the Gospels, to love their enemies, which they were taught in
their schools.
Based on malicious fabrications, ritual murder trials become endemic
during this period, and assume an ominous, inquisitorial character.
Cases of this nature are given great prominence, and are tried by the
highest Polish law court, the Crown Tribunal,[61] without any of the
safeguards of impartiality which had been provided for such cases by the
ancient charters of the Polish kings, and had been more recently
reaffirmed by Stephen Batory. In 1598 the Tribunal of Lublin sentenced
three Jews to death on the charge of having slain a Christian boy, whose
body had been found in a swamp in a near-by village. To force a
confession from the accused the whole inquisitorial torture apparatus
was set in motion, and execution by quartering was carried out with
special solemnity in Lublin. The body of the youngster, the involuntary
cause of the death of innocent victims, was transferred by the Jesuits
to one of the local churches, where it became the object of
superstitious veneration. Trials of this kind, with an occasional change
of scene, were enacted in many other localities of Poland and Lithuania.
Simultaneously a literary agitation against the Jews was set on foot by
the clerical party. Father Moyetzki published in 1598 in Cracow his
ferociously anti-Jewish book entitled "Jewish Bestiality" (_Okrucieństwo
Żydowskie_), enumerating all ritual murder trials which had ever taken
place in Europe and particularly in Poland, and adding others which were
invented for this purpose by the author.[62]
A Polish physician, named Shleshkovski, accused the Jewish physicians,
his professional rivals, of systematically poisoning and delivering to
death good Catholics, and declared the pest, raging at that time, to be
a token of the Divine displeasure at the protection granted to the Jews
in Poland (_Jasny dowód o doktorach żydowskich_, "A Clear Argument
Concerning Jewish Physicians," 1623).
But the palm undoubtedly belongs to Sebastian Michinski, of Cracow, the
frenzied author of the "Mirror of the Polish Crown" (_Zwierciadlo korony
Polskiej_, 1618). As a docile pupil of the Jesuits, Michinski collected
everything that superstition and malice had ever invented against the
Jews. He charged the Jews with every mortal sin--with political
treachery, robbery, swindling, witchcraft, murder, sacrilege. In this
scurrilous pamphlet he calls upon the deputies of the Polish Diet to
deal with the Jews as they had been dealt with in Spain, France,
England, and other countries--to expel them. In particular, the book is
full of libels against the rich Jews of Cracow, with the result that the
sentiment against the Jewish population of that city rapidly drifted
towards a riot. To forestall the possibility of excesses the King
ordered the confiscation of the book. The incendiary attacks of
Michinski also led to stormy debates at the Diet of 1618. While some
deputies eulogized him as a champion of truth, others denounced him as a
demagogue and a menace to the public welfare. The Diet showed enough
common sense to refuse to follow the lead of a writer crazed with
Jew-hatred; yet the opinions voiced by him gradually took hold of the
Polish people, and prepared the soil for sinister conflicts.
Sigismund III.'s successor, Vladislav IV., was not so zealous in his
Catholicism and in his devotion to the Jesuits as his father. He
exhibited a certain amount of tolerance towards the professors of other
creeds, endeavored to uphold the ancient Jewish privileges, and made it,
in general, his business to reconcile the warring estates with one
another. However, the strife between the religious and social groups had
already eaten so deeply into the vitals of Poland that even a far more
energetic king than Vladislav IV. would scarcely have been able to put
an end to it. Instead of harmonizing the conflicting interests, the King
sided now with one, now with another, party. In 1633 Vladislav IV.
confirmed, at the Coronation Diet,[63] the basic privileges of the Jews,
granting them full freedom in their export trade, fixing the limits of
their judicial autonomy, and instructing the municipalities to take
measures for shielding them against popular outbreaks. But at the same
time he forbade the Jewish communities to erect new synagogues or
establish new cemeteries, without obtaining in each case a royal
license. This restriction, by the way, may be considered a privilege,
inasmuch as an attempt had been made by Sigismund III. to make the right
of erecting synagogues dependent on the consent of the clergy.
Though on the whole desirous of respecting the rights of the Jews,
nevertheless, in individual cases, the King acted favorably on the
petitions of various cities to restrict these rights, and occasionally
revoked his own orders. Thus in June, 1642, he permitted the Jews of
Cracow to engage freely in export trade, but two months later he
withdrew his permission, the Christian merchants of Cracow having
complained to him about the effectiveness of Jewish competition.
Complying with the application of the burghers of Moghilev on the
Dnieper,[64] he confirmed, in 1633, his father's orders concerning the
transfer of the Jews from the center of the city to its outskirts, and
subsequently, in 1646, sanctioned the decision of the magistracy
prohibiting the letting of houses to them in a Christian neighborhood.
The law forbidding Jews to engage in petty trade on the market-place
effected in some cities a substantial rise in the prices of necessaries,
and the Shlakhta petitioned the King to repeal this prohibition for the
city of Vilna. Vladislav complied with the petition, but, to please the
Vilna municipality, he imposed at the same time a number of severe
restrictions on the local Jews, making them liable to the municipal
courts in monetary litigation with Christians, confining their area of
residence to the boundaries of the "Jewish street," and barring them
from plying those trades which were pursued by the Christian
trade-unions (1633). The same policy was responsible for the anti-Jewish
riots which took place about the same time in Vilna, Brest, and other
cities.
Nothing did more to accentuate these conflicts than the preposterous
economic policy of the Polish Government. The Warsaw Diet of 1643, in
endeavoring to determine the prices of various articles of merchandise,
passed a law compelling all merchants to limit themselves by a public
oath to a definite rate of profit, which was fixed at seven per cent in
the case of the native Christian (_incola_), five per cent in the case
of the foreigner (_advena_), and only three per cent in the case of the
Jew (_infidelis_). It is obvious that, being under the compulsion of
selling his goods at a cheaper price, the Jew on the one hand was forced
to lower the quality of his merchandise, and on the other hand was bound
to undermine Christian trade, and thereby draw upon himself the wrath of
his competitors.
As for the Polish clergy, true to its old policy it fostered in its
flock the vulgar religious prejudices against the Jews. This applies, in
particular, to the Jesuits, though, to a lesser degree, it holds good
also in the case of the other Catholic orders of Poland. A frequent
contrivance to raise the prestige of the Church was to engineer
impressive demonstrations. In the spring of 1636, when a Christian child
happened to disappear in Lublin, suspicion was cast upon the Jews, that
they had tortured the child to death. The Crown Tribunal, which tried
the case, and failed to find any evidence, acquitted the innocent Jews.
Thereupon the local clergy, dissatisfied with the judgment of the court,
manufactured a new case, this time with the necessary "evidence." A
Carmelite monk by the name of Peter asserted that the Jews, having lured
him into a house, told a German surgeon to bleed him, and that his blood
was squeezed out and poured into a vessel, while the Jews murmured
mysterious incantations over it. The Tribunal gave credit to this
hideous charge, and, after going through the regular legal proceedings,
including the medieval "cross-examinations" and the rack, sentenced one
Jew named Mark (Mordecai) to death. The Carmelite monks hastened to
advertise the case for the purpose of planting the terrible prejudice
more firmly in the hearts of the people.
Another trial of a similar nature took place in 1639. Two elders of the
Jewish community of Lenchitza were sentenced to death by the Crown
Tribunal on the charge of having murdered a Christian boy from a
neighboring village. Neither the protestation of the Starosta of
Lenchitza, that the case did not come within the jurisdiction of his
court, nor the fact that the accused, though put upon the rack, refused
to make a confession, were able to avert the death sentence. The bodies
of the executed Jews were cut into pieces and hung on poles at the
cross-roads. The Bernardine monks of Lenchitza turned the incident to
good account by placing the remains of the supposedly martyred boy in
their church and putting up a picture representing all the details of
the murder. The superstitious Catholic masses flocked to the church to
worship at the shrine of the juvenile saint, swelling the revenues of
the Bernardine church--which was exactly what the devout monks were
after.
While the Church was engineering the ritual murder trials for the sake
of "business," the municipal agencies, representing the Christian
merchant class, acted similarly for the purpose of ridding themselves of
the Jews and getting trade under their absolute control. This policy is
luridly illustrated by a tragic occurrence, which, in the years 1635 to
1637, stirred the city of Cracow to its depths. A Pole by the name of
Peter Yurkevich was convicted of having stolen some church vessels. At
the cross-examination, having been put upon the rack, he testified that
a Jewish tailor, named Jacob Gzheslik, had persuaded him to steal a
host. Since the Jew had disappeared and could nowhere be found,
Yurkevich was the only one to bear the death penalty. But before the
execution, in making his confession to the priest, he stated--and he
repeated the statement afterwards before an official committee of
investigation--the following facts:
I have stolen no sacraments from any church, and have never made
my God an object of barter. I merely stole a few silver and
other church dishes. My former depositions were made at the
advice of the gentlemen of the magistracy. The first time I was
conducted into the court room Judge Belza spoke to me as
follows: "Depose that you have stolen the sacraments and sold
them to the Jews. You will suffer no harm from it, while we
shall have a weapon wherewith to expel the Jews from Cracow." I
had hoped that this deposition would obtain freedom for me, and
I did as I had been told.
But Yurkevich's statement had no effect. He was convicted on the
strength of his original affidavit, though it had been squeezed out of
him by trickery and torture, and he was burned at the stake. As for the
Jews of Cracow, they had to bear the penalty in the shape of a riot, the
mob attacking the Jewish ghetto and seizing forty Jews, who were carried
off to be thrown into the river. Seven men were drowned, while the
others saved themselves by promising to embrace Christianity (May,
1637).
FOOTNOTES:
[42] According to approximate computations, the number of Jews in Poland
during that period (between 1501 and 1648) grew from 50,000 to 500,000.
[43] "Wine" is used here, as it is in the original, to designate
alcoholic drinks in general.
[44] "Propination," in Polish, _propinacja_ (pronounced _propinatzya_),
from Latin and Greek _propino_, "to drink one's health," signifies in
Polish law the right of distilling and selling spirituous liquors. This
right was granted to the noble landowners by King John Albrecht in 1496,
and became one of their most important sources of revenue. After the
partition of Poland this right was confirmed for the former Polish
territories by the Russian Government. The right of propination,
exercised mostly by Jews on behalf of the nobles, proved a decisive
factor in the economic and partly in the social life of Russo-Polish
Jewry.
[45] See p. 65.
[46] [Popular Polish form of the Jewish name Joseph.]
[47] See p. 64, n. 1.
[48] [_I. e._ Brest of Kuyavia, a former Polish province on the left bank
of the Vistula. It is to be distinguished from the well-known
Brest-Litovsk, Brest of Lithuania.]
[49] The parliamentary order of Poland was somewhat complicated. Each
region or _voyevodstvo_ (see above, p. 46, n. 1), of which there were
about sixty in Poland, had its own local assembly, or _sejmik_
(pronounced _saymik_), _i. e._ little Diet, or Dietine. Deputies o£
these Dietines met at the respective _sejms_ (pronounced _saym_), or
Diets, of one of the three large provinces of Poland: Great Poland,
Little Poland, and Red Russia. The national _sejm_, representing the
whole of Poland, came into being towards the end of the fifteenth
century. Beginning with 1573 it met regularly every two years for six
weeks in Warsaw or in Grodno. Before the convocation of this national
all-Polish Parliament, all local Dietines assembled on one and the same
day to give instructions to the deputies elected to it.
[50] [Gnesen as seat of the Primate; Cracow as capital.]
[51] [Warsaw was originally the capital of the independent Principality
of Mazovia. After the incorporation of Mazovia into the Polish Empire,
in 1526, Warsaw emerged from its obscurity and in the latter part of the
sixteenth century became the capital of united Poland and Lithuania,
taking the place of Cracow and Vilna.]
[52] According to another version, they forged the contents of the royal
warrant.
[53] [With the gradual weakening of the royal power, which, after the
extinction of the Yaghello dynasty, in 1572, was transformed into an
elective office, the favorite designation for the Polish Empire came to
be _Rzecz_ (pronounced _Zhech_) _Pospolita_, a literal rendering of the
Latin Res _Publica_. The term comprises Poland as well as Lithuania,
which, in 1569, had been united in one Empire.]
[54] They are referred to in his edicts as _calumniae_.
[55] [The Arian heresy, as modified and preached by Faustus Socinus
(1539-1604), an Italian who settled in Poland, became a powerful factor
in the Polish intellectual life of that period. Because of its liberal
tendency, this doctrine appealed in particular to the educated classes,
and its adherents, called Socinians, were largely recruited from the
ranks of the Shlakhta. Under Sigismund III. a strong reaction set in,
culminating in the law passed by the Diet of 1658, according to which
all "Arians" were to leave the country within two years.]
[56] [_Arendar_, also _arendator_, from medieval Latin _arrendare_, "to
rent," signifies in Polish and Russian a lessee, originally of a farm,
subsequently of the tavern and, as is seen in the text, other sources of
revenue on the estate. These arendars being mostly Jews, the name,
abbreviated in Yiddish to _randar_, came practically to mean "village
Jew."]
[57] [Literally, _lord_: the lord of the manor, noble landowner.]
[58] There is reason to believe that he is the hero of the legendary
story according to which an influential Polish Jew by the name of Saul
Wahl, a favorite of Prince Radziwill, was, during an interregnum,
proclaimed Polish king by the Shlakhta, and reigned for one night.
[59] [See pp. 29 _et seq._ Kiev was captured by the Lithuanians in 1320,
and remained, through the union of Lithuania and Poland, a part of the
Polish Empire until 1654, when, together with the province of Little
Russia, it was ceded to Muscovy.]
[60] See p. 55.
[61] [Stephen Batory instituted two supreme courts for the realm: one
for the Crown, _i. e._ for Poland proper, and another for Lithuania. The
former held its sessions in Lublin for Little Poland and in Piotrkov for
Great Poland (see p. 164).]
[62] A second edition of the book appeared in 1636.
[63] [In addition to the regular Diets, which assembled every two years
(see above, p. 76, n. 1), there were held also Election Diets and
Coronation Diets, in connection with the election and the coronation of
the new king. The former met on a field near Warsaw; the latter were
held in Cracow.]
[64] [Moghilev on the Dnieper, in White Russia, is to be distinguished
from Moghilev on the Dniester, a town in the present Government of
Podolia.]
CHAPTER IV
THE INNER LIFE OF POLISH JEWRY AT ITS ZENITH
1. KAHAL AUTONOMY AND THE JEWISH DIETS
The peculiar position occupied by the Jews in Poland made their social
autonomy both necessary and possible. Constituting an historical
nationality, with an inner life of its own, the Jews were segregated by
the Government as a separate estate, an independent social body. Though
forming an integral part of the urban population, the Jews were not
officially included in any one of the general urban estates, whose
affairs were administered by the magistracy or the trade-unions. Nor
were they subjected to the jurisdiction of Christian law courts as far
as their internal affairs were concerned. They formed an entirely
independent class of citizens, and as such were in need of independent
agencies of self-government and jurisdiction. The Jewish community
constituted not only a national and cultural, but also a civil, entity.
It formed a Jewish city within a Christian city, with its separate forms
of life, its own religious, administrative, judicial, and charitable
institutions. The Government of a country with sharply divided estates
could not but legalize the autonomy of the Jewish Kahal, after having
legalized the Magdeburg Law of the Christian urban estates, in which the
Germans constituted the predominating element. As for the kings, in
their capacity as the official "guardians" of the Jews, they were
especially concerned in having the Kahals properly organized, since the
regular payment of the Jewish taxes was thereby assured. Moreover, the
Government found it more to its convenience to deal with a well-defined
body of representatives than with the unorganized masses.
As early as the period of royal "paternalism," during the reign of
Sigismund I., the king endeavored to extend his fatherly protection to
the Jewish system of communal self-government. The appointment of
Michael Yosefovich as the "senior" of the Lithuanian Jews, with a rabbi
as expert adviser[65], was designed to safeguard the interests of the
exchequer by concentrating the power in the hands of a federation of
Kahals in Lithuania. On more than one occasion Sigismund I. confirmed
the "spiritual judges," or rabbis (_judices spirituales_, _doctores
legis_), elected by the Jews in different parts of Poland, in their
office. In 1518 he ratified, at the request of the Jews of Posen, their
election of two leading rabbis, Moses and Mendel, to the posts of
provincial judges for all the communities of Great Poland, bestowing
upon the newly-elected officials the right of instructing and judging
their coreligionists in accordance with the Jewish law. In Cracow, where
the Jews were divided into two separate communities--one of native
Polish Jews and another of immigrants from Bohemia,--the King empowered
each of them to elect its own rabbi. The choice fell upon Rabbi Asher
for the former, and upon Rabbi Peretz for the latter, community, and
when a dispute arose between the two communities as to the ownership of
the old synagogue, the King again intervened, and decided the case in
favor of the native community (1519). In 1531 Mendel Frank, the rabbi of
Brest, complained to the King that the Jews did not always respect his
decisions, and brought their cases before the royal starostas.
Accordingly Sigismund I. thought it necessary to warn the Jews to submit
to the jurisdiction of their own "doctors," or rabbis, who dispensed
justice according to the "Jewish law," and were given the right of
imposing the "oath" (_herem_, excommunication) and all kinds of other
penalties upon insubordinates. In the following year the King appointed
as "senior," or chief rabbi, of Cracow the well-known scholar Moses
Fishel--who, it may be added parenthetically, had taken the degree of
Doctor of Medicine in Padua--to succeed Rabbi Asher, referred to
previously. Pursuing the same policy of centralization, the King, a few
years later, in 1541, confirmed in their office as chief rabbis
(_seniores_) of the whole province of Little Poland two men "learned in
the Jewish law," the same Rabbi Moses Fishel of Cracow, and the famous
progenitor of Polish Talmudism, Rabbi Shalom Shakhna of Lublin.
In the same measure, however, in which the communal organization of the
Jews gained in strength, and the functions of the rabbis and Kahal
elders became more clearly defined, the Government gradually receded
from its attitude of paternal interference. The _magna charta_ of Jewish
autonomy may be said to be represented by the charter of Sigismund
Augustus, issued on August 13, 1551, which embodies the fundamental
principles of self-government for the Jewish communities of Great
Poland.
According to this charter, the Jews are entitled to elect, by general
agreement,[66] their own rabbis and "lawful judges" to take charge of
their spiritual and social affairs. The rabbis and judges, elected in
this manner, are authorized to expound all questions of the religious
ritual, to perform marriages and grant divorces, to execute the transfer
of property and other acts of a civil character, and to settle disputes
between Jews in accordance with the "Mosaic law" (_iuxta ritum et morem
legis illorum Mosaicae_) and the supplementary Jewish legislation. In
conjunction with the Kahal elders they are empowered to subject
offenders against the law to excommunication and other punishments, such
as the Jewish customs may prescribe. In case the person punished in this
manner does not recant within a month, the matter is to be brought to
the knowledge of the king, who may sentence the incorrigible malefactor
to death and confiscate his property. The local officers of the king are
enjoined to lend their assistance in carrying out the orders of the
rabbis and elders.
This enactment, coupled with a number of similar charters, which were
subsequently promulgated for various provinces of Poland, conferred upon
the elective representatives of the Jewish communities extensive
autonomy in economic and administrative as well as judicial affairs, at
the same time insuring its practical realization by placing at its
disposal the power of the royal administration.
The firm consolidation of the _régime_ of the self-governing community,
the _Kahal_, dates from that period. In this appellation two concepts
were merged: the "community," the aggregate of the local Jews, on the
one hand, and, on the other, the "communal administration," representing
the totality of all the Jewish institutions of a given locality,
including the rabbinate. The activity of the Kahals assumed particularly
large proportions beginning with the latter half of the sixteenth
century.
All cities and towns with a Jewish population had their separate Kahal
boards. Their size corresponded roughly to that of the given community.
In large centers the membership of the Kahal board amounted to forty;
in smaller towns it was limited to ten. The members of the Kahal were
elected annually during the intermediate days of Passover. As a rule the
election proceeded according to a double-graded system. Several electors
(_borerim_), their number varying from nine to five, were appointed by
lot from among the members of all synagogues, and these electors, after
taking a solemn oath, chose the Kahal elders. The elders were divided
into groups. Two of these, the _rashim_ and _tubim_ (the "heads" and
"optimates"), stood at the head of the administration, and were in
charge of the general affairs of the community. They were followed by
the _dayyanim_, or judges, and the _gabbaim_, or directors, who managed
the synagogues as well as the educational and charitable institutions.
The _rashim_ and _tubim_ formed the nucleus of the Kahal, seven of them
making a quorum; in the smaller communities they were practically
identical with the Kahal board.
The sphere of the Kahal's activity was very large. Within the area
allotted to it the Kahal collected and turned over to the exchequer the
state taxes, arranged the assessment of imposts, both of a general and a
special character, took charge of the synagogues, the Talmudic
academies, the cemeteries, and other communal institutions. The Kahal
executed title-deeds on real estate, regulated the instruction of the
young, organized the affairs appertaining to charity and to commerce and
handicrafts, and with the help of the _dayyanim_ and the rabbi settled
disputes between the members of the community. As for the rabbi, while
exercising unrestricted authority in religious affairs, he was in all
else dependent on the Kahal board, which invited him to his post for a
definite term. Only great authorities, far-famed on account of their
Talmudic erudition, were able to assert their influence in all
departments of communal life.
The Kahal of each city extended its authority to the adjacent
settlements and villages which did not possess autonomous organizations
of their own. Moreover, the Kahals of the large centers kept under their
jurisdiction the minor Kahals, or _prikahalki_,[67] as they were
officially called, of the towns and townlets of their district, as far
as the apportionment of taxes and the judicial authority were concerned.
This gave rise to the "Kahal boroughs," or _gheliloth_ (singular,
_galil_). Often disputes arose between the Kahal boroughs as to the
boundaries of their districts, the contested minor communities
submitting now to this, now to the other, "belligerent." On the whole,
however, the moderate centralization of self-government benefited the
Jewish population, since it introduced order and discipline into the
Kahal hierarchy, and enabled it to defend the civil and national
interests of Judaism more effectively.
The capstone of this Kahal organization were the so-called _Waads_,[68]
the conferences or assemblies of rabbis and Kahal leaders. These
conferences received their original impetus from the rabbis and judges.
The rabbinical law courts, officially endowed with extensive powers,
were guided in their decisions by the legislation embodied in the Bible
and the Talmud, which made full provision for all questions of
religious, civil, and domestic life as well as for all possible
infractions of the law. Yet it was but natural that even in this
extensive system of law disputed points should arise for which the
competency of a single rabbi did not suffice. Moreover there were cases
in which the litigants appealed from the decision of one rabbinical
court to another, more authoritative, court. Finally lawsuits would
occasionally arise between groups of the population, between one
community and another, or between a private person and a Kahal board.
For such emergencies conferences of rabbis and elders would be called
from time to time as the highest court of appeal.
Beginning with the middle of the sixteenth century these conferences
met at the time of the great fairs, when large numbers of people
congregated from various places, and litigants arrived in connection
with their business affairs. The chief meeting-place was the Lublin
fair, owing to the fact that Lublin was the residence of the father of
Polish rabbinism, the above-mentioned Rabbi Shalom Shakhna, who was
officially recognized as the "senior rabbi" of Little Poland. As far
back as in the reign of Sigismund I. the "Jewish doctors," or rabbis,
met there for the purpose of settling civil disputes "according to their
law." In the latter part of the sixteenth century these conferences of
rabbis and communal leaders, assembling in connection with the Lublin
fairs, became more frequent, and led in a short time to the organization
of regular, periodic conventions, which were attended by representatives
from the principal Jewish communities of the whole of Poland.
The activity of these conferences, or conventions, passed, by gradual
expansion, from the judicial sphere into that of administration and
legislation. At these conventions laws were adopted determining the
order of Kahal elections, fixing the competency of the rabbis and
judges, granting permits for publishing books, and so forth.
Occasionally these assemblies of Jewish notables endorsed by their
authority the enactments of the Polish Government. Thus, in 1580, the
representatives of the Polish-Jewish communities, who assembled in
Lublin, gave their solemn sanction to the well-known Polish law barring
the Jews of the Crown, of Poland proper, from farming state taxes and
other public revenues, in view of the fact that "certain people,
thirsting for gain and wealth, to be obtained from extensive leases,
might thereby expose the community to great danger."
Towards the end of the sixteenth century the fair conferences received a
firmer organization. They were attended by the rabbis and Kahal
representatives of the following provinces: Great Poland (the leading
community being that of Posen), Little Poland (Cracow and Lublin), Red
Russia (Lemberg), Volhynia (Ostrog and Kremenetz), and Lithuania (Brest
and Grodno). Originally the name of the assembly varied with the number
of provinces represented in it, and it was designated as the Council of
the Three, or the Four, or the Five, Lands. Subsequently, when Lithuania
withdrew from the Polish Kahal organization, establishing a federation
of its own, and the four provinces of the Crown[69] began to send their
delegates regularly to these conferences, the name of the assembly was
ultimately fixed as "the Council of the Four Lands" (_Waad Arba
Aratzoth_).
The "Council" was made up of several leading rabbis of Poland,[70] and
of one delegate for each of the principal Kahals selected from among
their elders--the number of the conferees altogether amounting to about
thirty. They met periodically, once or twice a year, in Lublin and
Yaroslav (Galicia) alternately. As a rule, the Council assembled in
Lublin in early spring, between Purim and Passover, and in Yaroslav at
the end of the summer, before the high holidays.
The representatives of the Four Lands--says a well-known
annalist of the first half of the seventeenth
century[71]--reminded one of the Sanhedrin, which in ancient
days assembled in the Chamber of Hewn Stones (_lishkath
ha-gazith_) of the temple. They dispensed justice to all the
Jews of the Polish realm, issued preventive measures and
obligatory enactments (_takkanoth_), and imposed penalties as
they saw fit. All the difficult cases were brought before their
court. To facilitate matters the delegates of the Four Lands
appointed [a special commission of] so-called "provincial
judges" (_dayyane medinoth_) to settle disputes concerning
property, while they themselves [in plenary session] examined
criminal cases, matters appertaining to _hazaka_ (priority of
possession) and other difficult points of law.
The Council of the Four Lands was the guardian of Jewish civil interests
in Poland. It sent its _shtadlans_[72] to the residential city of
Warsaw[73] and other meeting-places of the Polish Diets for the purpose
of securing from the king and his dignitaries the ratification of the
ancient Jewish privileges, which had been violated by the local
authorities, or of forestalling contemplated restrictive laws and
increased fiscal burdens for the Jewish population.
But the main energy of the Waad was directed towards the regulation of
the inner life of the Jews. The statute of 1607, framed, at the instance
of the Waad, by Joshua Falk Cohen, Rabbi of Lublin, is typical of this
solicitude. The following rules are prescribed for the purpose of
fostering piety and commercial integrity among the Jewish people: to pay
special attention to the observance of the dietary laws, to refrain from
adopting the Christian form of dress; not to drink wine with Christians
in the pot-houses, in order not to be classed among the disreputable
members of the community; to watch over the chastity of Jewish women,
particularly in the villages where the Jewish arendars[74] with their
families were isolated in the midst of the Christian population. In the
same statute rules are also laid down tending to restrain the activities
of Jewish usurers and to regulate money credit in general.
In 1623 the Kahals of Lithuania withdrew from the federation of the Four
Lands, and established a provincial organization of their own, which was
centralized in the convention of delegates from the three principal
Kahals of Brest, Grodno, and Pinsk. Subsequently, in 1652 and 1691, the
Kahals of Vilna and Slutzk were added. The Lithuanian assembly was
generally designated as the "Council of the Principal Communities of the
Province of Lithuania" (_Waad Kehilloth Rashioth di-Medinath Lita_). The
organic statute, framed by the first Council, comprises many aspects of
the social and spiritual life of the Jews. It lays down rules concerning
the mutual relationship of the communities, the methods of apportioning
the taxes among them, the relations with the outside world (such as the
Polish Diets, the local authorities, the landed nobility, and the urban
estates), the elections of the Kahals, and the question of popular
education. The Lithuanian Waad met every three years in various cities
of Lithuania, but in cases of emergency extraordinary conventions were
called. During the first years of its existence the Lithuanian Council
was evidently subordinate to that of Poland, but at a later date this
dependence ceased.
In this way both the Crown, or Poland proper, and Lithuania had their
communal federations with central administrative agencies. As was
pointed out previously, the Polish federation was composed of four
provinces. The individual Kahals, which were the componen
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