million of Jews lost their lives. The terror that followed the uprising
during the latter part of the seventeenth and the first half of the
eighteenth century threw the Jewish population of the southern provinces
into sad confusion. At that moment the _Hasidim_ [1] with their
Oriental fatalism, and their worship of the _Zaddik_ ("Saint"),
whom they revered as a wonder-worker, appeared upon the scene and won
the Jews of a large part of Poland to their standard. Then there ensued
a period of moral and intellectual degradation, which coincided
precisely with the epoch in which the civilizing influence of the
Meassefim was uppermost in Germany. [Footnote 1: Literally, the "pious."
A sect founded in Wolhynia in the second half of the eighteenth century,
the adherents of which, though they remained faithful to the Rabbinic
law, placed piety, mystic exaltation, and a worship of holy men in
opposition to the study of the Talmud and the dogmatism of the Rabbis.]

The reforms of Emperor Joseph II planned for the Jews in the part of
Poland annexed by Austria, especially the extension of compulsory
military service to them, were looked upon by the ignorant masses as a
dire misfortune. They rebelled against every change, and placed no
belief in the promises made by the authorities to better their
condition. They were terrorized by the severity of the measures taken
against them, and, impotent to carry on a struggle against authority,
they threw themselves into the arms of Hasidism, which preached the
merging of self in a mystic solidarity. This meant the cessation of all
growth, social as well as religious. Superstition established itself as
sovereign mistress, and the end was the utter degeneration of the
Austrian-Polish section of Jews.

In order to guard against the danger with which the spread of the new
sect was fraught, and enlighten at least the more intelligent of the