efusing to accept Christianity, and in 1790 a Jew was
quartered in Grodno, though the king had declined to sign his death
warrant. In some places Jews had to contribute towards the maintenance
of churches, and in Slutsk the law, enacted there in 1766, remains
unrevoked to this day. Elizabeta Petrovna did not imitate Ivan III. When
she discovered that Sanchez, her physician, was of the Jewish
persuasion, she discharged him without notice, after eighteen years of
faithful service. Similarly, when the Livonian merchants remonstrated,
maintaining that the exclusion of Jews from their fairs was fraught with
disastrous consequences to the commerce of the country, she is reported
to have replied, "From the enemies of Christ I will not receive even a
benefit."[4]

But worse things were yet to come, the worst since Chmielnicki's
massacres. The bitterness of both Poles and Russians against the Jews
grew especially intense as the days of the rozbior, the Partition of
Poland, drew near (1794). The Poles, forgetting the many examples of
loyalty and self-sacrifice shown by Jews in times of peace and war,
suspected them of being treacherous and unreliable; while the Russians,
though denying the patriotism of their own Jews, persisted in the
accusation that Polish Jews spent money lavishly in fomenting rebellion
and anarchy. The pupils of the Jesuits found great delight in attacks
upon the Jews, which frequently culminated in riot and bloodshed and the
payment of money by Jews to Catholic institutions. "What appalling
spectacles," exclaims a Christian writer, "must we witness in the
capital [Warsaw] on solemn holidays. Students and even adults in noisy
mobs assault the Jews, and sometimes beat them with sticks. We have seen
a gang waylay a Jew, stop his horses, and strike him till he fell from
the wagon. How can we look with indifference on such a survival of
barbarism?" The commonest manifestations of hatred and superstition,
however, were, as in other countries, the charge that Jews were
magicians, using the black art to avenge themselves on their
persecutors, and that they used Christian blood for their observance of
the Passover. The latter crime, the imputing of which was sternly
prohibited by an edict of the liberal Bathory, in 1576, was so
frequently laid at their door, that in the short period of sixty years
(1700-1760) not less than twenty such accusations were brought against
them, ending each time in the massacre of Jews by