CHAPTER II
THE JEWISH COLONIES IN POLAND AND LITHUANIA

1. The Immigration from Western Europe during the Period of the Crusades

While the Jewish colonies on the shores of the Black Sea and on the territory of modern South Russia were due to immigration from the lands of the Greco-Byzantine and Mohammedan East, the Jewish settlements in Poland were founded by new-comers from Western Europe, from the lands of German culture and "the Latin faith."²⁰ This division was a natural product of the historic development that made Slavonian Russia gravitate towards the East, and Slavonian Poland turn towards the West. Even prior to her joining the ecclesiastic organization of the West, Poland had attained to prominence as a commercial colony of Germany. The Slav lands on the banks of the Varta and Vistula, being nearest to Western Europe, were bound to attract the Jews, at a very early period, in their capacity as international traders. There is reason to believe that, as far back as the ninth century, Jews living in the German provinces of Charlemagne's Empire carried on commerce with the neighboring Slav countries, and visited Poland with their merchandise. These ephemeral visits frequently led to their permanent settlement in those strange lands.

Information concerning the Jews of pre-Christian Poland has come down to us in the shape of hazy legends. One of these legends narrates that, after the death of Prince Popiel, about the middle of the ninth century, the Poles assembled in Krushvitza, their ancient capital, to choose a successor to the dead sovereign. After prolonged disputes concerning the person to be elected, it was finally agreed that the first man found entering the town the following morning should be chosen as the ruler. It so happened that on the following morning the first to enter the town was the Jew Abraham Prokhovnik.²¹ He was seized and proclaimed prince, but he declined the honor, urging that it be accorded to a wise Pole by the name of Piast, who thus became the progenitor of the Piast dynasty.

Another legend has it that at the end of the ninth century a Jewish delegation from Germany waited upon the Polish Prince Leshek, to plead for the admission of Jews into Poland. Leshek subjected the delegates to a protracted cross-examination concerning the principles of the Jewish religion and Jewish morality, and finally complied with their request. Thereupon large numbers of German Jews began to arrive in Poland, and, in 905, they obtained special written privileges, which, according to the same legend, were subsequently lost. These obscure tales, though lacking all foundation in fact, and undoubtedly invented in much later times, contain a grain of historic truth, in that they indicate the existence of Jewish settlements in pagan Poland, and point to their German origin.

The propagation of Latin Christianity in Poland (beginning with 966), which placed the country under the control not only of the emperors of Germany but also of its bishops as the representatives of the Roman See, was bound to stimulate the intercourse between the two countries and result in an increased influx of Jewish merchants and settlers. However, this slow commercial colonization would scarcely have assumed any considerable dimensions, had not exceptional circumstances forced a large number of Jews to seek refuge in Poland. A compulsory immigration of this kind began after the first Crusade, in 1096. It started in near-by Slavonian Bohemia, where the Crusaders attacked the Jews of Prague, and converted them forcibly to Christianity. The Bohemian Jews made up their minds to flee to neighboring Poland, which had not yet been reached by the devastating Christian hosts. The Bohemian Prince Vratislav robbed the immigrants on the way, but even this could not prevent many of them from leaving the country in which both people and Government were hostile to them (1098).

Beginning with this period there was a steady flow of Jews from the Rhine and Danube provinces into Poland, increasing in volume as a result of the Crusades (1146-1147 and 1196) and the severe Jewish persecutions in Germany. The accentuation of Jewish suffering in Germany during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the royal power was incapable of shielding its Kammerknechte against the fury of the fanatical mob or the degrading canons of the Church, drove vast numbers of Jews into Poland. Here the refugees sought shelter in the provinces nearest to the Austro-German border, Cracow, Posen, Kalish, and Silesia.

The first signs of discord between Christians and Jews are to be noticed in the second half of the twelfth century, when Poland fell asunder into several feudal Principalities, or "Appanages."²² The Prince of Great Poland, Mechislav III., the Old, in his desire to enforce law and order, found it necessary to issue, in 1173, strict injunctions forbidding all kinds of violence against the Jews and in particular the attacks upon them by Christian "scholars," the pupils of the ecclesiastic and monastic colleges. Those found guilty of such attacks were to be heavily fined. On the whole, the rulers were willing to take the Jews under their protection. Under Mechislav the Old, Casimir the Just, and Leshek the White, who reigned at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Jews farmed and administered the mint of Great and of Little Poland. On the coins struck by these Jews, many of which have come down to us, the names of the ruling princes are marked in Hebrew characters.²³ At the very beginning of the thirteenth century (1203-1207) we hear of Jews owning lands and estates in Polish Silesia.

Such was the rise and growth of the Jewish colonies in Poland. As time went on, the commercial intercourse between these colonies and the West led to a spiritual relationship between them and the centers of Jewish culture in Europe. A contemporary Bohemian scholar of the Tosafist school, Rabbi Eliezer, informs us that the Jews of Poland, Russia, and Hungary, having no scholars of their own, invited their spiritual leaders from other countries, probably from Germany. These foreign scholars occupied the posts of rabbis, cantors, and school teachers among them, and were remunerated for their services. At the same time studious Polish Jews were in the habit of going abroad to perfect themselves in the sciences, as was also the case with the Jewish settlers in Russia. From the German mother country the Polish Jews received not only their language, a German dialect, which subsequently developed into the Polish-Jewish jargon, or Yiddish, but also their religious culture and their communal organization. All this, however, was in an embryonic stage, and only gradually unfolded in the following period.

2. The Charter of Prince Boleslav and the Canons of the Church

The importance of Jewish immigration for the economic development of Poland was first realized by the feudal Polish princes of the thirteenth century. Prompted by the desire of cultivating industrial activities in their dominions, these princes gladly welcomed settlers from Germany, without making a distinction between Jews and Christians. Nor did the native Slav population suffer inconvenience from this immigration, which, on the contrary, brought the first elements of a higher civilization into the country. In a land which had not yet emerged from the primitive stage of agricultural economy, and possessed only two fixed classes, owners of the soil and tillers of the soil, the Jews naturally represented the "third estate," acting as the pioneers of trade and finance. They put their capital in circulation, by launching industrial undertakings, by leasing estates, and farming various articles of revenue (salt mines, customs duties), and by engaging in money-lending. The native population, which medieval culture, with its religious intolerance and class prejudice, had not yet had time to "train" properly, lived at peace with the Jews.

The influence of the Church, on the one hand, and that of adjacent Christian Germany, on the other, slowly undermined this patriarchal order of things. The popes dispatched their legates to Poland to see to it that the well-known canonical statutes, which were permeated with implacable hatred against the adherents of Judaism, did not remain a dead letter, but were carried out in practice. During the same period the Polish princes, in particular Boleslav the Shy (1247-1279), endeavored to draw German emigrants into Poland, by bestowing upon them considerable privileges and the right of self-government, the so-called "Magdeburg Law," or ius teutonicum.²⁴ The Germans, while settling in the Polish cities as merchants and tradesmen,²⁵ and thus becoming the competitors of the Jews, imported from their native land into the new environment the spirit of economic class strife and denominational antagonism. The best of the Polish rulers were forced to combat the effects of this foreign importation, and found it necessary to encourage the economic activity of the Jews for the benefit of the country and to shield them against the insults of their Christian neighbors.

Boleslav of Kalish, surnamed the Pious, who ruled over the territory of Great Poland, was a prince of this kind. In 1264, with the consent of the highest dignitaries of the state, he promulgated a statute defining the rights of the Jews within his dominions. This charter of privileges, closely resembling in its contents the statutes of Frederick of Austria and Ottocar of Bohemia, became the corner-stone of Polish-Jewish legislation. Boleslav's charter consists of thirty-seven paragraphs, and begins with these words:

The deeds of man, when unconfirmed by the voice of witnesses or by written documents, are bound to pass away swiftly and disappear from memory. Because of this, we, Boleslav, Prince of Great Poland, make it known to our contemporaries as well as to our descendants, to whom this writing shall come down, that the Jews, who have established themselves over the length and breadth of our country, have received from us the following statutes and privileges.

The first clause of the charter prescribes that, when civil and criminal cases are tried in court, the testimony of a Christian against a Jew is to be accepted only if confirmed by the deposition of a Jewish witness. The following clauses (§§ 2-7) determine the process of law in litigation between Christians and Jews, involving primarily pawnbroking; the rules prescribed there protect equally the interests of the Jewish creditor and the Christian debtor. Lawsuits between Jew and Jew do not fall within the jurisdiction of the general municipal courts, but are tried either by the prince himself or by his lord lieutenant, the voyevoda²⁶, or the special judge appointed by the latter (§ 8). The Christian who has murdered or wounded a Jew answers for his crime before the princely court: in the former case the culprit incurs "due punishment," and his property is forfeit to the prince; in the latter case he has to satisfy the plaintiff, and must in addition pay a fine into the princely exchequer (§§ 9-10).

This is followed by a set of paragraphs which guarantee to the Jew the inviolability of his person and property. They forbid annoying Jewish merchants on the road, exacting from them higher customs duties than from Christians, demolishing Jewish cemeteries, and attacking synagogues or "schools" (§§ 12-15). In case of a nocturnal assault upon the home of a Jew, the Christian neighbors are obliged to come to his rescue as soon as they hear his cries; those who fail to respond are subject to a fine (§ 36).

The rights and functions of the "Jewish judge,"²⁷ who is appointed to try cases between Jew and Jew, sitting "in the neighborhood of the synagogue or in some other place," are set forth elaborately (§§ 16-23). The kidnaping of Jewish children with the view of baptizing them is severely punished (§ 27). The charter further prohibits charging the Jews with the use of Christian blood for ritual purposes, in view of the fact that the groundlessness of such charges had been demonstrated by papal bulls. Should nevertheless such charges be raised, they must be corroborated by six witnesses, three Christians and three Jews. If the charges are substantiated, the guilty Jew loses his life; otherwise the same fate overtakes the Christian informer (§ 32). All these legal safeguards were, in the words of the charter, to remain in force "for all time."

The Polish lawgiver was evidently anxious to secure for the Jews such conditions of life as might enable them to benefit the country by their commercial activity, while enjoying liberty of conscience and living in harmony with the non-Jewish population. Boleslav's enactment expresses, not the individual will of the ruler, but the collective decision of the highest dignitaries and the representatives of the estates, who, as is pointed out in the document, had been previously consulted.

Thus the temporal powers of the state, guided by the economic needs of the country, endeavored to establish Jewish life in Poland on more or less rational civic foundations. The ecclesiastic authorities, however, inspired rather by the cosmopolitan ideals of the Roman Church than by love of their native land, strained all their energies to detach the Jews from the general life of the country. They segregated them from the Christian population because of their alleged injuriousness to the Catholic faith, and reduced them to the position of a despised caste. The well-known Church Council of Breslau, convened in 1266 by the Papal Legate Guido, had the special mission of introducing in the oldest Polish diocese, that of Gnesen, the canonical laws, including those applying to the Jews. The motives by which this legislation was prompted are frankly stated in the preamble to the section of the Breslau "constitution" which deals with the Jews:

In view of the fact – runs clause 12 – that Poland is a new plantation on the soil of Christianity (quum adhuc terra Polonica sit in corpore Christianitatis nova plantatio