Mila 18 - Leon Uris [27]
Jews suffered maltreatment during the years of their dispersion in all countries of their dispersion from massacres to expulsions. The fever of Jew baiting heightened to a new level during the Spanish Inquisition, when torture and bestiality were as common as daily prayer.
In the Dark Ages the Jews were blamed for the Black Plague and for witchcraft and for ritual murder.
But it was the Crusaders under the flag of Holy Purification and in the name of God who set out to kill every Jew in Europe. The massacres became so bloody that wave after wave of Jews fled from the fountainhead of butchery in Bohemia to the newly emerging kingdom of Poland.
Here the Jews were welcomed and this was their real beginning, along with the beginning of Poland itself. Jews were needed, for there was no middle class between the landed gentry and the peasants. The Jews brought with them their arts, crafts, trades, professions, and ability as merchants.
“And how was cheder today, Andrei?”
“The boys tease me because they say Andrei Androfski is not a Jewish name.”
“Aha! Well, it is a very Jewish name. It appears all down our family line. Our family were very old in France before they emigrated to Poland during the Crusades.”
“Poppa, why must you and Rabbi Gewirtz talk so much about history? I want to know about things happening today. Why do we spend so much time in the past?”
“Why?” Israel Androfski thrust his finger skyward and repeated an old Hebrew phrase. “Know from where you come. Before you know who you are and where you are going, you must know from where you come.”
And so Andrei learned that a series of Polish kings granted a number of charters guaranteeing religious freedom and protection to the Jews soon after their arrival in Poland from Bohemia.
However, this condition of security was short-lived, and not long after their arrival there opened a sordid, almost thousand-year parade of oppression against the Jews which never stopped but only varied in intensity from time to time.
It began as the Roman Church grew in power and consolidated its position as the state religion. The Jesuits of Posen and Krakow triggered Middle Age riots against the Jews, persisting in the spreading of lies about ritual murder libels.
The Jesuits received help from immigrant Germans who were the competition with the Jews in commerce. With Church help they managed to obtain a Jew’s tax, expulsion from competitive crafts and trades and professions. The feudal pans kept Jews from owning or farming land.
And so to Poland came the honor of creating one of the world’s first ghettos, an enforced separation of the Jews from the rest of the citizens by walling and locking them in.
Banned from participation in national life and from participation in the normal economic life, they were compelled to be a breed apart.
In their ghettos, limited in their means of livelihood, the Jews began their long tradition of self-rule and self-help. Banded together without choice, they intensified their studies of the Holy Books to find the answers to the thousand year-old dilemma.
“We are like a bird.” Rabbi Gewirtz said. “We are a long way from home and we cannot fly that far, so we circle and circle and circle. Now and again we light upon a branch of a tree to rest, but before we can build our nest we are driven away and must fly again—aimlessly in our circle ...”
Polish Jews turned bitter against their homeland. The Poles used the very difference which they had forced on the Jews to prove Jews were not like other people. The Jews had no identity as Poles. They spoke Yiddish, a language carried from Bohemia. They created their own culture and literature apart from the masses around them.
In 1649 the greatest calamity since the fall of the Temples crushed the Jews of Poland. Cossacks of the Ukraine, aided by the Tatars, staged a revolt against the feudal pans of Poland. In the wake of gory, savage fighting, the Cossacks became obsessed with