hardly imagine what pain a Jew of that time
experienced when he hastened to the house of God on one of the great
Holy Days only to find its doors closed by the police!

Their status was no better in Lithuania and Great Russia. The accession
of Ivan IV, the Terrible (1533-1584), dealt their former comparative
prosperity a blow from which it has not recovered to this day. As if to
remove the impression of liberalism made by his predecessor and
obliterate from memory his amicable relations with Doctor Leo, de
Guizolfi, and Chozi Kolos, this monster czar, with the fiendishness of a
Caligula, but lacking the accomplishments of his heathen prototype,
delighted to invent tortures for inoffensive Jews. He expelled them from
Moscow, and deprived them of the right of travel from place to place.
During his occupancy of Polotsk he ordered all Jews residing there
either to become converts to Greek Catholicism or choose between being
drowned in the Dwina and burnt at the stake.

But even the removal of the terrible czar and the dawn of the century of
reason and humanitarianism failed to effect a change for the better in
the condition of the Slavonic Jews. For a while it appeared as if the
Zeitgeist might penetrate even into Russo-Poland, and the Renaissance
and the Reformation would not pass over the eastern portion of Europe
without beneficent results. In Lithuania Calvinism threatened to oust
Catholicism, science and culture began to be pursued, and Jewish and
Gentile children attended the same schools. The successors of Ivan IV
were men of better breeding, and the praiseworthy attempts of Peter the
Great to introduce Western civilization are known to all.[3] But
Slavonic soil has never been susceptible to the elevating influences
that have transformed the rest of Europe. Every reformatory effort was
nipped in the bud. The lot of the Jews accordingly grew from bad to
worse. In 1727 they were expelled from the Ukraine and other provinces,
and they were recalled, "for the benefit of the citizens," only at the
instance of Apostol, the hetman of the very Cossacks that had massacred
them in 1648. Baruch Leibov was burned alive in St. Petersburg, in 1738,
for having dared "insult the Christian religion by building a synagogue
in the village of Zvyerovichi," an offence that was aggravated by the
suspicion that he had converted the Russian Captain Vosnitzin to
Judaism. The same fate was, in 1783, meted out to Moses, a Jewish
tailor, for r