Disorder and class strife saved the Polish people from the "order" of the Inquisition and the consistency of autocratic hangmen.
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