Posen, and the young Sabbataï Cohen drew up penitential prayers (Selichoth), mostly selected from older pieces, for this sad memorial day.

After a pause of a year and a half, the war between Cossacks and Poles broke out in the early part of the year 1651, the first victims again being Jews, as Chmielnicki and the wild Zaporogians now fell upon the Polish territory where Jewish communities had again settled. The massacre, however, could not be so extensive as before; there no longer were thousands of Jews to slaughter. Moreover the evil days had inspired the Jews with courage; they armed a troop of Jewish soldiers, and enlisted them in the king's service. The fortune of war turned against the Cossacks, and they were obliged to accept the peace dictated by the king (November 11, 1651). John Casimir and his ministers did not forget to guard the rights of the Jews in the treaty. They were to be permitted to settle anywhere in the Ukraine, and to hold property on lease.

This treaty also was concluded and ratified only to be broken. Chmielnicki had accepted it to strengthen himself and restore his reputation with the Cossacks. As soon as he had gained his first object, he began hostilities against the Poles, from which Jews always suffered most severely. In two years after the first insurrection of the Zaporogians, more than 300 communities were completely destroyed by death or flight, and the end of their suffering had not yet arrived. The Polish troops could not withstand the violent attacks or skillful policy of Chmielnicki. When he could no longer hope for help from the Tartars, he combined with the Russians, and incited them to a war against unhappy Poland, divided against itself. In consequence of the Russian war in the early part of 1654 and 1655, those communities suffered which had been spared by the Cossack swarms, i. e., the western districts and Lithuania. The community of Wilna, one of the largest, was completely depopulated (July, 1655) by slaughter on the part of the Russians and by migration. As if fate were then determining upon the partition of Poland, a new enemy was added to the Cossacks and Russians in Charles X of Sweden, who used Poland as the first available pretext to slake his thirst for war. Through the Swedish war, the communities of Great and Little Poland, from Posen to Cracow, were reduced to want and despair. The Jews of Poland had to drink the cup of poison to the dregs. The Polish general, Czarnicki, who hated the Jews, ill-used those spared by Cossacks, Russians, and the wild Swedes of the Thirty Years' War, under the pretense that they had a traitorous understanding with the Swedes. The Poles also behaved barbarously to the Jews, destroyed the synagogues, and tore up the holy scriptures. All Poland was like a bloody field of battle, on which Cossacks, Russians, Prussians, Swedes, and the troops of Prince Ragoczi of Transylvania wrestled; the Jews were ill-used or slain by all. Only the Great Elector of Brandenburg behaved leniently towards them. The number of Jewish families said to have perished in ten years of this war (600,000) is certainly exaggerated, but the slaughtered Jews of Poland may well be rated at a quarter of a million. With the decline of Poland as a power of the first rank, the importance of Polish Judaism diminished. The remnant were impoverished, depressed, and could not recover their former position. Their need was so great, that those who drifted to the neighborhood of Prussia hired themselves to Christians as day laborers for field work.

As at the time of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal every place was filled with fugitive Sephardic Jews, so during the Cossack-Polish war fugitive Polish Jews, wretched in appearance, with hollow eyes, who had escaped the sword, the flames, hunger, and pestilence; or who, dragged by the Tartars into captivity, had been ransomed by their brethren, were seeking shelter everywhere. Westwards, by way of Dantzic and through the Vistula district, Jewish-Polish fugitives wandered to Amsterdam, and were forwarded thence to Frankfort-on-the-Main and other Rhenish cities. Three thousand Lithuanian Jews came to Texel in the Netherlands, and were hospitably received. Southwards many fled to Moravia, Bohemia, Austria, and Hungary, and wandered from those places to Italy. The prisoners in the armies of the Tartars came to the Turkish provinces, and some of them drifted to Barbary. Everywhere they were received by their brethren with great cordiality and love, cared for, clothed, and supported. The Italian Jews ransomed and supported them at great sacrifice. Thus, the community of Leghorn at this time formed a resolution to collect and spend a quarter of their income for the liberation and maintenance of the unfortunate Polish Jews. The German and Austrian communities, also, although they had suffered under the calamities of the Thirty Years' War, exercised that brotherly feeling which they rarely professed with their lips, but cherished the more deeply in their hearts.

The number and misery of those escaped from Poland were so great, that the German communities and probably others were obliged to devote the money intended for Jerusalem to the maintenance of Polish Jews. The Jews of Jerusalem dependent on alms, who were drained by the pasha and his subordinates, felt the want of their regular support from Europe. They soon fell into such distress, that of the 700 widows and a smaller number of men living there nearly 400 are said to have died of hunger.

The Cossack persecution of the Jews, in a sense, remodeled Judaism. It became Polonized, so to speak. The Polish-Rabbinical method of study had long dominated the Talmudical schools of Germany and Italy through the abundant literature by Polish authors. Now, through the fugitives, most of whom were Talmudical scholars, it became authoritative. Rabbinical appointments were mostly conferred on Polish Talmudists, as in Moravia, Amsterdam, Fürth, Frankfort, and Metz. On account of their superiority in their department, these Polish Talmudists were as proud as the Spanish and Portuguese fugitives had been, and looked down with contempt on the rabbis who spoke German, Portuguese, and Italian. Far from giving up their own method in a foreign country, they demanded that all the world should be regulated by them, and they gained their point. People joked about the "Polacks," but nevertheless became subordinate to them. Whoever wished to acquire thorough Talmudic and Rabbinical knowledge was obliged to sit at the feet of Polish rabbis; every father of a family who wished to educate his children in the Talmud sought a Polish rabbi for them. These Polish rabbis gradually forced their sophistical piety upon the German, and partly on the Portuguese, and Italian, communities. Through their influence, scientific knowledge and the study of the Bible declined still more than previously. In the century of Descartes and Spinoza, when the three Christian nations, the French, English, and Dutch, gave the death-blow to the Middle Ages, Jewish-Polish emigrants, baited by Chmielnicki's bands, brought a new middle age over European Judaism, which maintained itself in full vigor for more than a century, to some extent lasting to our time.

CHAPTER II.
SETTLEMENT OF THE JEWS IN ENGLAND AND MANASSEH BEN ISRAEL.

Obstacles to the Resettlement of Jews in England—Manasseh ben Israel—His Character and Attainments—Christian Students of Jewish Literature: Scaliger, the Buxtorfs, Selden, and Vossius—Women devote themselves to Hebrew—The Fifth-Monarchy Men: Expectation of the Millennium—Enthusiastic Friends of the Jews—The Puritans—Cromwell and Holmes—Nicholas'