Countries" (Poland, Little Poland, Little Russia, and, later, Lithuania,
with its autonomous synod). Constituting almost the whole of the Third
Estate of a country three times the size of France, the Jews were not
only merchants, but also, and more particularly, artisans, workingmen,
and even farmers. They were a people apart, distinct from the others.
The restricted ghettos and small communities of the Occident widened
out, in Poland, into provinces with cities and towns peopled by Jews.
The Thirty Years' War, which had cast a large number of German Jews into
Poland, produced the effect of giving a definite constitution to this
social organism. The new-comers quickly attained to controlling
influence in the Jewish communities, and succeeded in foisting their
German idiom upon the older settlers. One of their distinguishing traits
was that they pushed the study of the Law to the utmost. The Talmud
schools in Poland and the Polish Rabbis soon acquired a reputation
unassailed in the whole of the Diaspora. Despised and maltreated by the
Polish magnates, condemned, by reason of a never-ceasing stream of
immigration and the meagre resources of the country, to a bitter
struggle for existence, the Jews of Poland centred all their ambition in
the study of the Law, and consoled themselves with the Messianic hope.
Empty casuistry and dry dogmatism sufficed for the intellectual needs of
the most enlightened. A piety without limit, the rigorous and minute
observance of Rabbinical prescriptions, and a cult compounded of
traditional and superstitious practices accumulated during many
centuries, filled the void left in their minds by the wretched life of
the masses. To satisfy the cravings of the heart, they had the homilies
of the _Maggidim_ ("preachers"), a sort of popular instruction
based on sacred texts, tricked out with Talmudic narratives, mystic
allusions, and a variety of superstitions.

By the dreadful insurrection of the Cossacks in the Ukraine, half a