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 refusing 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