Mila 18 - Leon Uris [28]
And, like the Arab world after the Mongol invasions, the Jews of Poland never recovered from the Cossack massacres.
Numbed from the butchery, they entered an era of desperation and sought a way out of the long black night through their Holy Books.
The cult of the cabala snowballed. The cabala, a study of mystic meanings of the Holy Books, was taught by cabalistic rabbis who preached the Zohar and the Book of Creation. Through cryptic numerology and mystics they sought to overcome the suffering of daily life by finding hidden meanings in the Bible.
Along with the cabalists came a parade of false messiahs. Self-declared messiahs proclaimed themselves the anointed leader to take the Jews back to the Holy Land. A desperate, anguished people disposed of reason and flocked behind them.
King of the frauds was Sabbatai Zvi, a Turkish Jew, who through distortions of the cabala “proved” himself the Messiah. Throughout the world of dispersed Jewry the elders and the rabbis from Amsterdam to Salonika, from Kiev to Paris, argued the validity of Sabbatai Zvi’s claims. It was the Polish Jewry who arose, drowning logic with the maddened hope that he could lead them to escape.
A crushing delusion. Sabbatai Zvi was converted to Islam and became a Mohammedan to escape the wrath of the Turkish sultan.
Jacob Frank, a Bohemian rabbi, relit the fires after Sabbatai’s death in Albania, but the Frankist sect carried out sex orgies and debasements of the Holy Laws. In the end, Jacob Frank was converted to Catholicism.
And all of the false messiahs fell, and the Jews of Poland sank deeper into a muck of despondency. From the depths of their despair emerged the Hassidim. Israel Baal Shem Tov erupted with yet another new cult which captured the imagination of the enslaved Jews in their ghetto dungeons. The Hassidim detached themselves from the world of daily tribulation and reality through frenzied prayer that transcended the pain about them. Wild! Leaping! Screaming! Moaning! The joy of prayer!
“Poppa! I don’t want to be a tailor or a chicken seller!” Andrei cried. “I don’t want to be a Hassid! I want to be like other people in Warsaw.”
Israel Androfski’s face saddened. He stroked his son’s curly bush of hair. “My boy will not be a chicken seller. You will be a great Talmudic scholar.”
“No, Poppa, no. I don’t want to go to cheder any more!”
His father raised his hand in anger, but the slap never came, for Israel Androfski was too gentle a man. He looked at the burning in his son’s eyes with puzzlement.
“I want to be a soldier—a soldier like Berek Joselowicz,” Andrei whispered.
Poland, partitioned, at constant war with Germany and Russia, ceased to exist as a state time and again in her long and bloody history. At the end of the 1700s she was again in the throes of one of her numerous rebellions, this time against the Russian Tsar on the east and the King of Prussia on the west. Desperate for manpower, the Poles allowed Berek Joselowicz, a Jew of Vilna, and Josef Aronwicz to organize a Jewish brigade, a radical departure from past principle. Five hundred of them took the field in the defense of Warsaw. Twenty of them survived. With the precedent set, the Jews answered the call to arms in Poland’s rebellions against Russia in 1830 and 1863, but as Russia gobbled Poland and the state disappeared from the face of the earth, a huge land ghetto was formed called the Jewish Pale of Settlement. Beyond the Pale, no Jew could travel or live.
And through the 1800s the web of economic strangulation, boycott, excessive taxation, and bestial pogroms continued. Murder of Jews was supported by the Tsar and overlooked by the Russian Orthodox Church. The Jews were driven into a position of mass destitution.
A few fumbling calls for reforms were heard, but the voices were far softer than the gangs of roving Jew killers.
And a new generation