riginality was admired
and research encouraged. As at a Spartan feast, youth and age
commingled, men of all ages and diverse attainments exchanged views, and
all benefited by mutual contact.

Those whose position precluded devotion to study availed themselves at
least of the means for mutual improvement at their disposal. They
organized societies for the study of certain branches of Jewish lore,
and for the meetings of these societies the busiest spared time and the
poorest put aside his work. It was a people composed of scholars and
those who maintained scholars, and the scholars, in dress and
appearance, represented the aristocracy, an aristocracy of the
intellect.

Such was the pre-Haskalah period. From the meagre data at our disposal
we are justified in concluding, that, left undisturbed, the Slavonic
Jews would have evolved a civilization rivalling, if not surpassing,
that of the golden era of the Spanish Jews. But this was not to be.
Their onward march met a sudden and terrific check. Hetman Chmielnicki
at the head of his savage hordes of Russians and Tatars conquered the
Poles, and Jews and Catholics were subjected to the most inhuman
treatment. The descendants of those who, in 1090, had escaped the
Crusaders fell victims in 1648 to the more cruel Cossacks. About half a
million Jews, it is estimated, lost their lives in Chmielnicki's
horrible massacres. The few communities remaining were utterly
demoralized. The education of the young was neglected, both sacred and
secular branches of study were abandoned. And when the storm calmed
down, they found themselves deprived of the accumulations of centuries,
forced, like Noah after the deluge, but without his means, to start
again from the very beginning. Indeed, as Levinsohn remarks, the wonder
is that, despite the fiendish persecution they endured, these
unfortunates should have preserved a spark of love of knowledge. Yet a
little later it was to burst into flame again and bring light and warmth
to hearts crushed by "man's inhumanity to man."

(Notes, pp. 305-310.)

CHAPTER II

THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION

1648-1794

The storm of persecution that had been brewing in the sixteenth century,
and which burst in all its fury by the middle of the seventeenth
century, was allayed but little by the rivers of blood that streamed
over the length and breadth of the Slavonic land. Half a million Jewish
victims were not sufficient to satisfy the followers of a reli