History of the Jews in Russia and Poland (Vol. 1-3). Dubnow Simon

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СКАЧАТЬ as the cities are concerned, the Jews were engulfed in endless litigation with the Christian merchant guilds and trade-unions, which wielded a most powerful weapon in their hands by controlling the city government or the magistracy. Competition in business and trade was deliberately disguised beneath the cloak of religion, for the purpose of inciting the passions of the mob against the Jews. The Christian merchants and tradesmen found an enthusiastic ally in the Catholic clergy. The seed sown by the Jesuits yielded a rich harvest. Religious intolerance, hypocrisy, and superstition had taken deep root in the Polish people. Religious persecution, directed against all "infidels," be they Christian dissidents or Jews "who stubbornly cling to irreligion," was one of the mainsprings of the inner politics of Poland during its period of decay.

      The enactments of the Catholic synods are permeated by malign hatred of the Jews, savoring of the spirit of the Middle Ages. The Synod of Lovich held in 1720 passed a resolution "that the Jews should nowhere dare build new synagogues or repair old ones," so that the Jewish houses of worship might disappear in the course of time, either from decay or through fire. The Synod of 1733 held in Plotzk repeats the medieval maxim, that the only reason for tolerating the Jews in a Christian country is that they might serve as a "reminder of the tortures of Christ and, by their enslaved and miserable position, as an example of the just chastisement inflicted by God upon the infidels."

      6. A Frenzy of Blood Accusations

      The end of the seventeenth century is marked by the frequency of religious trials, the Jews being charged with ritual murder and the desecration of Church sacraments. These charges were the indigenous product of the superstition and ignorance of the Catholic masses, but they were also used for propaganda purposes by the clerical party, which sometimes even took a direct hand in arranging the setting of the crime, by throwing dead bodies into the yards of Jews, and other similar contrivances. Such propaganda often resulted in the adoption of violent measures by the authorities or the mob against the alleged culprits, leading to the destruction of synagogues and cemeteries and sometimes culminating in the expulsion of the Jews.

      The cases of ritual murder were tried by the highest court, the Tribunal of Lublin, and, owing to the zeal of the astute champions of the Church, frequently ended in the execution of entirely innocent persons. The most important trials of this kind, those of Sandomir (1698–1710), Posen (1736), and Zaslav (1747), were conducted in inquisitorial fashion.

The Sandomir case was brought about by the action of a Christian woman who threw the dead body of her illegitimate child into the yard of a Kahal elder, by the name of Berek,152 thus giving the clergy a chance to engineer a ritual murder trial. The case passed through all the courts of law. It was greatly complicated by the fanatical agitation of the priest Stephen Zhukhovski, who brought two additional charges of ritual murder against the Jews of Sandomir, and published, on this occasion, a book full of hideous calumnies. The case having ended in the lower courts favorably for the Jews, Zhukhovski succeeded in bringing about a new trial with the application of tortures and the whole apparatus of the Inquisition. He finally reached his goal. The Tribunal of Lublin sentenced the innocent Jewish elder to death; King Augustus II. ordered, in 1712, the expulsion of all Jews from Sandomir and the conversion of the synagogue into a Catholic chapel,153 and the Catholic clergy placed a revolting picture in the local church representing the scene of the ritual murder.

      To justify the miscarriage of justice, Father Zhukhovski and his accomplices induced a converted Jew, by the name of Serafinovich, who posed as a former Rabbi of Brest, and had testified at the Sandomir trial against the Jews, to write a book, entitled "Exposure of the Jewish Ceremonies before God and the World" (1716). The book, a mixture of a lunatic's ravings and an adventurer's unrestrained mendacity, centers around the argument, that the Jews use Christian blood in the discharge of a large number of religious and everyday functions. The Jews are alleged to smear the door of a Christian with such blood, to predispose the latter in favor of the Jews. The same blood put in an egg is given to newly-married couples during the marriage ceremony; it is mixed in the matza eaten on Passover. It is also used for soaking an incantation formula written by the rabbi, which is then placed under the threshold of a house, to secure success in business for the Jewish inmate. In a word, Christian blood is used by the Jews for every possible form of magic and witchcraft. To convict Serafinovich publicly of lying, the Jews challenged him to attend a disputation in Warsaw in the presence of bishops and rabbis. The disputation had been arranged to be held in the house of the widow of a high official, and both the Jewish and Christian participants had arrived, but Serafinovich failed to appear at the meeting, where his trickery and ignorance would have been exposed. The refusal of the informer to attend the disputation was attested in an official affidavit. This fact did not prevent an anti-Semitic monk of Lemberg, by the name of Pikolski, from republishing Serafinovich's book twice (1758 and 1760) and using it as a tool to conduct a most hideous agitation against the Jews.

In the large Jewish community of Posen, the slanderous accusations against the Jews were the reflection of the inveterate hostility of the local Christian population. Towards the end of the seventeenth century the Carmelite order in Posen contrived a curious lawsuit against the Jews, alleging that following upon the desecration of the hosts in 1399154 the Jews had, by way of penance for their sacrilege, obligated themselves to accompany the Christian processions. The Jews denied the allegation, and the case dragged on for a number of years in various courts of law, with the result that, in 1724, the Jews had to pledge themselves to furnish the Carmelites with two pails of oil annually to supply the lamp burning in front of the three hosts in the church.

But the fanaticism of the Church was on the lookout for new victims, and it manifested itself in 1736 in another ritual murder trial, which lasted for four years. Everything was pre-arranged in accordance with the "rites" of the Church fanatics. The dead body of a Christian child was found in the neighborhood of the city. There was also found a Polish beggar-woman, who, under torture, confessed that she had sold the child to the elders of the Posen community. Arrests followed. The first victims were the preacher, or darshan, Arie-Leib Calahora, a descendant of the martyr Mattathiah Calahora,155 an elder (parnas, or syndic) of the Jewish community, by the name of Jacob Pinkasevich (son of Phineas), and several other members of the Kahal administration. Further wholesale arrests were imminent, but many Jews fled from Posen, to save themselves from the fury of the inquisitors.

      On the eve of his arrest, Calahora chose for the text of his Sabbath discourse the Biblical verse, "Who can count the dust of Jacob and the number of the fourth part (or quarter) of Israel? Let me die the death of the righteous!" (Numbers xxiii. 10). As if anticipating his end, the preacher explained the text as follows: "Who can count the dust and ashes of those that were burned and quartered for the faith of Israel?" While being led to jail, he addressed the crowd of Jews surrounding him with the following words: "At the hour of my death I shall not have around me ten Jews for prayer (minyan). Therefore recite with me for the last time the prayer Borkhu ('Praise the Lord of Praise!')." The forebodings of the preacher were justified. Neither he nor the elder survived the fiendish tortures of the cross-examination. While the preacher was tortured, his bones being broken and his body roasted on fire, the elder was compelled to hold a lamp in his hand to give light to the executioner. Covered with wounds and blood, in the stage of mortal agony, they were carried to their homes, where they died in the autumn of 1736.

      The deputies of the Jewish community of Posen appealed to King Augustus III. against the cruelty and partiality of the municipal court, and succeeded in having the case transferred to a special judicial commission consisting of royal officials. Although the commission resorted equally to tortures during the cross-examination, it was not able to wrest a confession from the innocent Jewish prisoners. Nevertheless, being convinced in advance of the correctness of the ritual libel, the judges sentenced them to be burned at the stake, together with СКАЧАТЬ