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 arendar⁵⁶ in the village, who procured an income for the pan⁵⁷ 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 1399⁶⁰ 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).